The Doorbell Rang (10 page)

“As conjecture, yes.”

“Then I should look into the lecture question. She might have a tight alibi. According to Cramer, the G-men left about eleven o’clock, and of course they had combed the place, whether they killed him or not; they got the material he had gathered. So they arrived not later than ten-thirty, or even make it ten-forty. If she shot him she was out before they came. The New School is on Twelfth Street. If anyone saw her at the lecture as late as ten-twenty, or even a quarter past, she’s clear. I’ll start asking.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. If they learned you were doing that, either by surveillance of you or through inadvertence, they would know we were seriously considering the possibility that that woman killed him, and that would be disastrous. We must maintain the illusion that we are convinced that a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Morris Althaus and that we are procuring evidence to establish it; otherwise our preparations for next Thursday evening will come to nothing. For protection of our flank we needed to know definitely if Miss Dacos was lying, and you have settled that: she was. Satisfactory. She lied to conceal the fact that she had compromised herself, and that satisfies us. Whether her involvement was merely a secret intimacy she doesn’t want revealed, or was murder by her hand, is of no importance to us.”

“Cramer would love to know that. After giving us the steer.

I’ll call him and tell him, to relieve his mind.”

“Pfui. When we have relieved our minds by finishing the job we were hired to do we’ll consider our obligation to him. If it seems feasible without excessive effort we’ll expose the murderer for him. If it isn’t a member of the FBI, as he expects and hopes, he won’t thank us, but we’ll owe him no apology.”

“Then we forget the murder until after Thursday.”

“Yes.”

“That’s just dandy. Agencies are closed today and tomorrow, so Hewitt can’t start looking until Monday. I’ll be at the Flamingo this evening if anything happens; for instance, if Hewitt calls to say he has decided that it’s too much trouble and we have to find someone else. Tomorrow Miss Rowan is having a crowd in for Sunday lunch and dancing and I’ll stay afterwards to help empty ashtrays. Any instructions for this afternoon?”

“Turn off the radio,” he growled.

It bothered me for four days and four nights, from Saturday afternoon, when Wolfe said we would forget the murder, to Wednesday morning, when I did something about it on my own.

There were two aspects. First, if the conjecture about Sarah Dacos, or something like it, was actually a fact, I had removed evidence from the scene of a murder and was withholding it. Of course the cops had had their whack at it, they had certainly seen the photograph and had left it there, and Mrs Althaus had given me the keys, but that was only a legal out. It was the second aspect that really bothered me. Cramer had saved our licenses for us, at least so far, and it was me, Archie Goodwin, he had invited to a conference and bought a carton of milk for and turned loose on a homicide. I have no objection to playing games with cops, sometimes you want to and sometimes you have to, but this was different. I owed Cramer something personally.

So it bothered me, but something else was bothering me still more, the act Wolfe was staging, the fanciest on record. Too much of it, nearly all of it, was entirely out of our control. For instance, when I called Hewitt from a booth Monday evening to ask how he had made out, and he said fine, he had got one actor at one agency and the other at another, and they would both come to his place Tuesday afternoon, and I asked if he had made sure that the one for me could drive a car and had a license, he said he had forgotten to ask, but everyone could drive a car! And that was absolutely vital and he knew it. He said he would find out right away; he had the actor’s phone number. On some other details he was okay, like his phone call to our number Tuesday noon, as arranged. He told Wolfe he was extremely sorry, he apologized, but he would be able to include only twelve Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in the shipment instead of twenty, and no Oncidium flexuosum at all. He said he would do his best to get it off by noon Wednesday, so it should arrive by two o’clock. He handled that perfectly. He was also okay on the call he made Tuesday evening, to report on the supplies and arrangements for the dinner for the Ten for Aristology, but for him that was just routine, and anyway it was straight.

Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather were no worry because they had been left to Saul to handle, and if there was any snag he would let us know. How was up to him.

Off and on all day and evening Monday, and even some on Tuesday, Wolfe and I discussed a problem. It wasn’t an argument; we just discussed it. Should I phone Wragg, the special agent in charge, arrange to meet him somewhere, tell him that Wolfe had got enough dope on the Althaus homicide to make it really tough and I wanted out, and offer to pass everything we had over to him for ten grand or twenty grand or fifty grand'

The trouble was we didn’t know him. It might make it next to certain that he would take the bait, but it might do just the opposite, make him smell a rat. Finally, late Tuesday morning, we crossed it off. It was too chancy, and time was too short.

At nine o’clock Wednesday morning, when I heard the elevator taking Wolfe up to the plant rooms, I took my second cup of breakfast coffee to the office, to sit and look at an idea that had been pecking at me off and on since Monday morning. There would be nothing for me until the truckload of orchids arrived at two o’clock; everything had been done that could be done as far as I knew, which wasn’t very far. When I finished the coffee it was only nine-twenty, and Sarah Dacos probably didn’t start the day at the Bruner office until nine-thirty or even ten. I went to the cabinet, unlocked the drawer where we keep assortments of keys, and made some selections. It wasn’t complicated, since I knew the lock was a Bermatt. From another drawer I got a pair of rubber gloves.

At 9:35 I dialed the Bruner number, and it was answered. “Mrs Bruner’s office, good morning.”

“Good morning. Miss Dacos?”

“Yes.”

“This is Archie Goodwin. I may need to see Mrs Bruner later today, and I’m calling to ask if she’ll be available.”

She said it depended on how late, Mrs Bruner expected to be in the office from three-thirty to five-thirty, and I said I would call again if I needed to come.

So she was at her job. I would have to take a chance on the cleaning woman. I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was going out to make some phone calls, to the hall for my hat and coat, and out and to Ninth Avenue for a taxi.

For the street door at 63 Arbor Street I still had the key Mrs Althaus had given me, so I was clean until I stood at Sarah Dacos’s door and got out the collection of keys. When I had knocked twice, and pushed the button twice and heard the ring, with no response, I tried a key. The fourth one did it, smooth and easy. I put the gloves on, turned the knob, opened the door, crossed the sill, and shut the door, and I had broken and entered according to the statutes of the State of New York.

The layout was the same as upstairs, but the furniture was quite different. Rugs here and there instead of carpet, smaller couch smothered with pillows, no desk or typewriter, fewer chairs, about one-fourth as many books, five little pictures on the walls which the bold lover must have considered old hat. The drapes were drawn, and I turned the lights on, put my coat and hat on the couch, and went and opened a closet door.

There were two facts: the cleaning woman might come any minute, and I had no idea what I might find, if anything. The point was simply that there might be something that would help, no matter what was going to happen Thursday night, to square it with Cramer for that carton of milk. A fast once-over was called for, and I spent only ten minutes on the living room and its two closets and then went to the bedroom.

I came mighty close to passing it by. The bedroom closet was crammed-clothes on hangers, shoe racks, luggage, cartons and hatboxes on two high shelves. The bag and two suitcases were packed with summer clothes, and I skipped the hatboxes; I would have given a finif of my money to know if the cleaning woman came Wednesdays. But ten minutes later, going through a drawerful of photographs one by one, I realized that it was dumb to skip the hatboxes and then waste time with a bunch of photographs which could tell me nothing I didn’t already know, so I took a chair to the closet, mounted it, and got the boxes down. There were three. The first one contained three so-called hats and two bikinis. The second one held one big floppy hat. I lifted it out, and there on the bottom was a revolver. I gawked at it for five seconds, then took it out and inspected it. It was an S & W.38 and held one cartridge that had been fired and five that hadn’t.

I stood with it in my hand. It was a hundred to one that it was the gun that Althaus had had a permit for, and it had fired the bullet that had gone through him, and Sarah Dacos had pulled the trigger. To hell with the one chance in a hundred. The question was what to do with it. If I took it, it would never be an acceptable exhibit in a murder trial, since I had got it illegally. If I left it there and went out to a phone booth and rang Cramer to tell him to get a warrant to search Sarah Dacos’s apartment, the cops would get the gun all right, but if the FBI found out about it within thirty-six hours, as they easily might, the big act for Thursday night would be kaput. And of course if I left it in the hatbox and didn’t phone Cramer, Sarah Dacos might decide that tonight would be a good time to take it and toss it in the river.

Since that left only one alternative, the only decision that had to be made was where to put it. I returned the hat to the box and the boxes to the shelf, put the chair back where it belonged, and looked around. No spot in the bedroom appealed to me, and I moved to the living room. It was now more than ever desirable not to be interrupted by a cleaning woman or anyone else. I went and examined the couch and found that underneath the cushion was a box spring, and underneath the spring was a plywood bottom. Good enough. If she got the hatbox down and found the gun gone, she certainly wouldn’t suppose it had merely been moved to another spot in the apartment and start looking. I put it on the bottom under the spring, glanced around to see that things were as I had found them, grabbed my hat and coat, and got out of there in such a hurry that I almost appeared on the sidewalk wearing rubber gloves.

In the taxi I had to answer another question: did I or didn’t I tell Wolfe'Why not wait until Thursday night had come and gone'The answer was really simple, but of course that’s one thing we use our minds for, finding complicated reasons for dodging simple answers. By the time the cab stopped in front of the old brownstone my mind had run out of reasons and I was facing the fact that it wouldn’t improve with age.

It was ten minutes past eleven, so Wolfe would be down from the plant rooms, but he wasn’t in the office. There was noise in the kitchen, the radio going loud, and I went there. Wolfe was standing by the big table scowling at Fritz, who was bending over to sniff at a slab of smoked sturgeon. They didn’t hear me enter, but Fritz saw me when he straightened up, and Wolfe turned and demanded, “Where have you been?”

I told him I had a report. He told Fritz to have the cutlets ready at a quarter past two, he wasn’t going to wait longer than that, and headed for the office, and I followed. I turned the radio on. As I brought a yellow chair around I saw three screwdrivers on his desk pad-one from my desk drawer and two from the kitchen, and I had to grin. He had the tools ready, himself. As I sat I told him I had assumed that he would eat an early lunch. He said no, if a man has guests he should be at table with them.

“Then there’s plenty of time,” I said, “to discuss a brief report. With so much on your mind I could save it, but you’ll like to know that I have clinched the alternative we prefer. I went for a walk and happened to pass Sixty-three Arbor Street, and I happened to have a key in my pocket that fitted the lock on Sarah Dacos’s door, so I went in and looked around, and in a hatbox in a closet I found a revolver, an S and W thirty-eight. One cartridge had been fired. As you know, Cramer told me that Althaus had a permit for an S and W thirty-eight and it wasn’t in his apartment, though there was a box of cartridges in a drawer. So she-“

“What did you do with it?”

“I moved it. It seemed out of place in a box with a lady’s hat, so I put it under a box spring on a couch.”

He took a deep breath, held it in a second, and let it out. “She shot him,” he growled.

“Right. As I was saying when you interrupted.”

“Will she find it?”

“No. If she misses it she won’t even look. My understanding of attractive young women. She might lam. If she does I’ll have a problem. If she’s gone and I tell Cramer about the gun I’ll be up a tree. If I don’t tell him I’ll lie awake nights.”

He shut his eyes. In two moments he opened them. “You should have told me you were going.”

“I should not. It was a personal errand in which a quart of milk was involved. Even if she stays put I’ll have a problem, if tomorrow night is a turkey. If and if. Just now I wanted to ring Hewitt from a booth and ask him if the orchids are packed. Shall I?”

“No. He’s busy. I believe guns can be identified?”

“Sure. Scientists can do it now even if the number has been filed off. And Cramer will have the number of the one Althaus had a permit for.”

“Then there will be no problem. I must see about that sturgeon.” He left his chair and headed for the door. Short of it he stopped and turned, said, “Satisfactory,” and went. I shook my head and went on shaking it as I replaced the yellow chair. “There will be no problem,” for God’s sake. I thought if I had an ego that size I’d be the boss of the FBI, and then realized that that wasn’t exactly the way to put it. I returned the keys and gloves to the cabinet, went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, since lunch would be late, and to listen to them discuss sturgeon.

With a couple of hours to go, possibly more, after the milk was down I made the rounds-first two flights up to my room, to see that everything was in order for the guests who would occupy my bed. Fritz isn’t supposed to touch my room; it’s mine, including the responsibility. It was okay, except that the two pillows I had got from the closet that morning weren’t the same size, but that couldn’t be helped. Then to the South Room, which is above Wolfe’s, where two more guests would sleep on the twin beds. That visit was unnecessary, since Fritz never makes mistakes, but I had time to kill.

It got killed somehow.

I wasn’t expecting them until two at the earliest, but I should have known better, since Saul was in charge. Wolfe was in the kitchen and I was in the front room, which adjoins the office, checking that blankets were on the sofa, when the doorbell rang and I glanced at my watch. Twenty to two, so it couldn’t be the truck.

But it was. Going to the hall, I saw a big bozo in a leather jacket on the stoop. When I opened the door he boomed at me, “Nero Wolfe'Orchids for you!”

I stepped out. At the curb was a big green truck with red lettering on its side: NORTH SHORE TRUCKING CORPORATION. Another big bozo was at its rear, opening the doors. I said fairly loud that it was pretty damn cold for orchids and I would come and help. By the time I got my coat on and went out they had a box on the edge at the back and were pulling it around. I happened to know its exact size-three feet wide, five feet long, and two feet high-because I had packed boxes exactly like it with orchid plants on their way to dealers or exhibitions. On its side it was marked:

FRAGILE PERISHABLE

TROPICAL PLANTS

KEEP AS WARM AS POSSIBLE

I descended to the sidewalk, but they lifted it off and got the handles at the ends, obviously not needing any help, even up the steps. Above, Wolfe had the door open and they entered. The natural thing for me was to stay and guard the truck, so I did. There were five more boxes inside, all the same. One of the five would be quite a load even for those two huskies, but I didn’t know which one. It proved to be the next to the last. As they eased it down and took the handles one of them said, “Jesus, these must be in lead pots,” and the other one said, “Naw, gold.” I wondered if there was a G-man close enough to hear. They got it up the stoop without a stumble, though it was close to three hundred pounds, counting the box-or I hoped it was. When they took the last one in I went along. Wolfe signed a receipt, and I gave each of them two bucks and got thanked and waited until they were on the sidewalk to shut the door and bolt it.