Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 46 (6 page)

Most of the forty-some books on shelves in Pierre Ducos’s room were about cooking. What I was after didn’t have to be a piece of paper, but that was the most likely, since I wanted something, anything, that could lead to either the man who had left the slip of paper on the tray or the one who had paid a C for it. One item that had seemed possible was a notebook I found in a drawer that had lists of names on several pages, but Lucile Ducos had told me they were the names of men who gave big tips. She said Pierre hadn’t been good at remembering names and he had written them down for twenty years.

I hadn’t been in her room. When, arriving, I had told
her grandfather, with her as interpreter, that I wanted to take a look in Pierre’s room, and why, I had got the impression that she didn’t like it, but he had got emphatic and it took. I had also got the impression that she was staying with me to see if I took anything and if so what. Getting impressions from her wasn’t difficult, beginning with the impression that it didn’t matter whether I had two legs or four legs, or whether I wore my face in front or behind. But
she
mattered—I mean to her. Her face, which wasn’t bad at all, was well cared for, also her nice brown hair, and the cut and hang of her light-brown dress were just right. It was hard to believe she went to all that trouble just for the mirror.

She was seated in an easy chair the other side of the reading lamp. When I did the last book and put it back on the shelf, I turned to her and said, “I suppose you’re right, if he put something somewhere it would be in this room. Have you remembered anything he said?”

“No.”

“Have you tried to?”

“I told you I knew I couldn’t because he hadn’t said anything.”

Her voice had a little too much nose. I looked down at her. Up to a few inches above her knees, she had good legs. A pity. I decided to try another approach. “You know, Miss Ducos,” I said, “I have tried to be polite and sympathetic, I really have. But I wonder why you don’t give a damn who killed your father. That doesn’t seem very—well, natural.”

She nodded. “You would. You think I should be weeping and wailing or maybe doing a Medea. Bullshit. I was a good daughter, good enough. Of course I give a damn who killed him, but I don’t think you’re going to find out the way you’re going at it, all this about a man who gave him some money for a piece of paper. Or if you
do, it won’t be by nagging me to remember something that didn’t happen.”

“What would you suggest? How would you do it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a great detective like Nero Wolfe. But you say what killed him was a bomb put in his pocket by someone. Who put it there? I’d find out where he was yesterday and who he saw. That would be the first thing I would do.”

I nodded. “Sure. And have your toes tramped on by a few dozen homicide experts who are doing just that. If he can be tagged that way, they’ll get him without any help from Nero Wolfe. Of course one person your father saw yesterday was you. I haven’t asked you about your relations with him, and I’m not going to, because the cops certainly have. And they’re asking around about you. You were at the District Attorney’s office five hours, you said, so you know how that is. They know all about people killing their fathers. Also, of course they asked you if there was anyone who might have wanted him dead. What did you say?”

“I said no.”

“But someone did want him dead.”

She sneered. I admit I didn’t like her, but I’m not being unfair. She sneered. “I knew you’d say that,” she said. “They did too, and it’s not only obvious, it’s dumb. Somebody might have thought his coat belonged to someone else.”

“Then you think it was just a mistake?”

“I didn’t say I
think
it. I said it might have been.”

“Didn’t your grandfather tell you what Nero Wolfe told him your father told me?”

“No. He never tells me anything. He thinks women haven’t any brains. You probably do too.”

I wanted to say that I merely thought
some
women were a little shy on brains, present company not excepted,
but I skipped it. I said, “Your father told me that a man was going to kill him, so it wasn’t a mistake. Also it wasn’t you, since you’re not a man. So let’s go back. Evidently your father didn’t agree with your grandfather about women, because your grandfather told Mr. Wolfe that your father often asked your advice about things. That’s why I think he might have told you something about a man who gave him a hundred dollars for a slip of paper.”

“He never asked my
advice
. He just wanted to see what I would say.”

I gave up. I wanted to ask her what the difference was between asking her advice and wanting to see what she would say, just to see what she would say, but we were expecting company at the office at eleven o’clock or soon after and I should be there. So I gave up on her, and I had finished the job on the room, since it wasn’t likely that he had pried up a floorboard or taken the back off a picture frame. I will concede that she had fairly good manners. She went to the hall with me and opened the door and told me good night. Apparently Mr. Ducos and the white apron had both gone to bed.

It was ten after eleven when I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone, found the bolt wasn’t on so I didn’t need help to get in, and went to the office. Wolfe would be deep in either a book or a crossword puzzle, but he wasn’t. In one of my desk drawers I kept street maps of all five New York boroughs, and he had them, with Manhattan spread out covering his desk blotter and then some. To my knowledge it was the first time he had ever given it a look. It might be supposed that I wondered what he was after, but I didn’t because I had learned long ago that wondering what a genius was after was a waste of time. If it really meant anything, which I doubted, he would tell me when he felt like it.
As I swiveled my chair and sat to face him, he started folding it up, his fingers quick and nimble and precise, as they always were. Of course they had a lot of practice up in the plant rooms, from nine to eleven mornings and two to four afternoons, but that day he hadn’t been there at all.

As he folded he spoke. “I was calculating distances—the restaurant, and Pierre’s home, and here. He arrived here at ten minutes to one. Where had he been? Where had his coat been?”

“I’ll have to apologize,” I said, “to his daughter. I told her that if that kind of detecting will do it they won’t need your help. Does it look that bad?”

“No. As you know, I prefer not to read when I may be interrupted at any moment. What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. It’s possible she has nothing to tell, but I don’t believe it. She sat for an hour with her eye on me while I went over Pierre’s room, to make sure I didn’t pinch a pair of socks. She’s an anomaly—I
think
that’s the word I want. Or make—”

“It isn’t. A person can’t be an anomaly.”

“All right, she’s a phony. A woman who has those books with her name in them wants men to stop making women sex symbols, and if she really wants them to stop she wouldn’t keep her skin like that, and her hair, and blow her hard-earned pay on a dress that sets her off. Of course she can’t help her legs. She’s a phony. Since Pierre said it was a man, I admit she probably didn’t put the bomb in his pocket, but I would buy it that he told her about the slip of paper and showed it to her, and she knows who killed him and is going to put the squeeze on him, or try to. And she’ll get killed and we’ll have that too. I suggest that we put a tail on her. If you have other plans for me, get Fred or Orrie, or maybe even Saul. Do you want it verbatim?”

“Do I need it?”

“No.”

“Then just the substance.”

I crossed my legs. “First she interpreted for me with her grandfather while I asked for permission to take a look at Pierre’s room, and the other points you wanted covered. Of course she could have hashed that—with an interpreter you never know for sure. Then she went with me—”

The doorbell rang, and I got up and went. We had expected Philip around eleven and Felix a little later, but they were both there. And from the look on their faces, they weren’t speaking. They spoke to me as I let them in and took their coats, but apparently not to each other. In the office, when they were seated after being greeted by Wolfe’s most exaggerated nod, a full half-inch—of course Felix in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk—Philip sat stiff with no mouth showing on his dark-skinned square face because his lips were pressed so tight, and Felix didn’t really sit, he just got his rump on the edge of the chair and blurted, “I kept Philip there, Mr. Wolfe, because he lied to me. As you know, I—”

“If you please.” Of course Felix had often heard that tone when Wolfe had been his boss as trustee. “You’re upset. I suppose you’ve had a hard day, but so have I. I’ll have beer. Brandy for you?”

“No, sir. Nothing.”

“Philip?”

Philip shook his head. I detoured around him on my way to the kitchen. When I came back, Felix was sitting, not perching, and was talking: “… eight of them. They kept coming and going all afternoon and evening. I got their names. It was the worst day we have ever had since the day Mr. Vukcic died. The first two came
just at the end of lunch, three o’clock, and it never stopped, right on through dinner. It was terrible. Everybody, even the dishwasher. The main thing with them was the dump room—you know, Mr. Vukcic called it that, so we do—the room in the back where the men leave their things. They took everybody there, one at a time, and asked about Pierre’s coat. What is it about Pierre’s coat?”

“You’ll have to ask them.” The foam in the glass had reached the right level, and Wolfe picked it up and drank. “You have me to thank for the day they gave you. Because he was killed here, in my house. But for that it would be mere routine for them. Did they arrest anyone?”

“No, sir. I thought one of them was going to arrest me. He said he knew there was something special between you and Pierre, and Mr. Goodwin too, and he said I must know about it. He told me to get my coat and hat, but then he changed his mind. He was the same with—”

“His name was Rowcliff.”

“Yes, sir.” Felix nodded. “It may be true that you know everything. Mr. Vukcic told me that you thought you did. That man was the same with Philip because I told him that he was Pierre’s best friend.” He looked at Philip, not as a friend, and went back to Wolfe. “Philip may have lied to him, I don’t know, I know he lied to me. You remember what Mr. Vukcic told Noel that time when he fired him. He told him it wasn’t because he stole a goose, anyone might steal a goose, it was because he lied about it. He said he could keep it a good restaurant even if some of them stole things sometimes, but not if anybody lied to him, because he had to know what happened. I always remember that and I will not permit them to lie to me, and they know it. If I don’t know what happened, it won’t be a good restaurant.
So when the last one left, I took Philip upstairs and told him I had to know everything about Pierre that he knew, and he lied. I have learned to tell when one of them is lying. I’m not as good at it as Mr. Vukcic was, but I can nearly always tell. Look at him.”

We looked. Philip looked back at Felix and unglued his mouth to say, “I told you I was lying. I admitted it.”

“You did not. That’s another lie.”

Philip looked at Wolfe. “I told him I was leaving something out because I couldn’t remember. Isn’t that admitting it, Mr. Wolfe?”

“It’s a nice point,” Wolfe said. “It deserves discussion, but I think not here and now. You were leaving out something that Pierre had done or said?”

“Yes, sir. I admitted I couldn’t remember it.”

Wolfe grunted. “This afternoon I asked you to try to recall everything he said yesterday, and you said you would but you couldn’t do it at the restaurant. Now you admit there was something you can’t remember?”

“It wasn’t that, Mr. Wolfe. It wasn’t what he said yesterday.”

“Nonsense. A rigmarole. You’re wriggling. Do you want me to form the conjecture that you killed him? Do you or don’t you want the murderer exposed and punished? Do you or don’t you know something that might help to identify him? You said you wept when you learned he was dead. Did you indeed?”

Philip’s mouth was closed, clamped again. His eyes closed. He shook his head several times, slow. He opened his eyes, turned his head to look at Felix, turned it back and on around to look at me, and back again to Wolfe, and spoke. “I want to talk to you alone, Mr. Wolfe.”

Wolfe turned to Felix. “The front room, Felix. As you know, it’s soundproofed.”

“But I want—”

“Confound it, it’s past midnight. I’ll tell you later, or I won’t. Certainly
he
won’t. I’m spent, and so are you.”

I got up and crossed to open the door to the front room, and Felix came. I stuck my head in to see that the door to the hall was closed, shut that one, and returned to my desk. As I sat, Philip said, “I said alone, Mr. Wolfe. Just you.”

“No. If Mr. Goodwin leaves and you tell me anything that suggests action, I’ll have the bother of repeating to him.”

“Then I must—you must both promise not to tell Felix. Pierre was a proud man, Mr. Wolfe. I told you that. He was proud of his work and he didn’t want to be just a good waiter, he wanted to be the
best
waiter. He wanted Mr. Vukcic to think he was the best waiter in the best restaurant in the world, and then he wanted Felix to think that. Maybe he does think that, and that’s why you must promise not to tell him. He must not know that Pierre did something that no good waiter would ever do.”

“We can’t promise not to tell him. We can only promise not to tell him unless we must, unless it becomes impossible to find the murderer and expose him without telling Felix. I can promise that, and do. Archie?”

“Yes, sir,” I said firmly. “I promise that. Cross my heart and hope to die. That’s American, Philip, you may not know it. It means I would rather die than tell him.”

“You have already told us,” Wolfe said, “that he told you about getting orders mixed and serving them wrong, so that can’t be it.”

“No, sir. That was just yesterday. It was something much worse. Something he told me last week, Monday, a week ago yesterday. He told me a man had left a piece
of paper on the tray with the money, and he had kept it, a piece of paper with something written on it. He told me he had kept it because the man had gone when he went to return it, and then he didn’t give it to Felix to send it to him because what was written on it was a man’s name and address and he knew the name and he wondered about it. He said he still had it, the piece of paper. So after you talked to me today, after you told me he said a man was going to kill him, I wondered if it could have been on account of that. I thought it might even have been the man whose name was on the paper. I knew it couldn’t have been the man who had left the paper on the tray, because he was dead.”