Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 18

by Curtains for Three

  “I saw no one.” Fritz spoke louder than usual. “I didn’t even see Archie go in.” He took a step forward, still like a soldier. “I would like to say something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I think a great deal of all this disturbance is unnecessary. My duties here are of the household and not professional, but I cannot help hearing what reaches my ears, and I am aware of the many times that Mr. Wolfe has found the answer to problems that were too much for you. This happened here in his own house, and I think it should be left entirely to him.”

  I yooped, “Fritz, I didn’t know you had it in you!”

  “All this disturbance,” he insisted firmly.

  “I’ll be goddamned.” Cramer was goggling at him. “Wolfe told you to say that, huh?”

  “Bah.” Wolfe was contemptuous. “It can’t be helped, Fritz. Have we plenty of ham?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sturgeon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Later, probably. For the guests in the front room, but not the police. Are you through with them, Mr. Cramer?”

  “No.” Cramer went back to Saul. “You checked the guests in?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I had a list of the members of the Manhattan Flower Club. They had to show their membership cards. I checked on the list those who came. If they brought a wife or husband, or any other guest, I took the names.”

  “Then you have a record of everybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “How complete is it?”

  “It’s complete and it’s accurate.”

  “About how many names?”

  “Two hundred and nineteen.”

  “This place wouldn’t hold that many.”

  Saul nodded. “They came and went. There wasn’t more than a hundred or so at any one time.”

  “That’s a help.” Cramer was getting more and more disgusted, and I didn’t blame him. “Goodwin says he was there at the door with you when that woman screamed and came running out of the office, but that you hadn’t seen her enter the office. Why not?”

  “We had our backs turned. We were watching a man who had just left go down the steps. Archie had asked him for his name and he had said that was ridiculous. If you want it, his name is Malcolm Vedder.”

  “The hell it is. How do you know?”

  “I had checked him in along with the rest.”

  Cramer stared. “Are you telling me that you could fit that many names to that many faces after seeing them just once?”

  Saul’s shoulders went slightly up and down. “There’s more to people than faces. I might go wrong on a few, but not many. I was at that door to do a job and I did it.”

  “You should know by this time,” Wolfe rumbled, “that Mr. Panzer is an exceptional man.”

  Cramer spoke to a dick standing by the door. “You heard that name, Levy—Malcolm Vedder. Tell Stebbins to check it on that list and send a man to bring him in.”

  The dick went. Cramer returned to Saul. “Put it this way. Say I sit you here with that list, and a man or woman is brought in, and I point to a name on the list and ask you if that person came this afternoon under that name. Could you tell me positively?”

  “I could tell you positively whether the person had been here or not, especially if he was wearing the same clothes and hadn’t been disguised. On fitting him to his name I might go wrong in a few cases, but I doubt it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Mr. Wolfe does,” Saul said complacently. “Archie does. I have developed my faculties.”

  “You sure have. All right, that’s all for now. Stick around.”

  Saul and Fritz went. Wolfe, in his own chair at the end of the dining table, where ordinarily, at this hour, he sat for a quite different purpose than the one at hand, heaved a deep sigh and closed his eyes. I, seated beside Cramer at the side of the table that put us facing the door to the hall, was beginning to appreciate the kind of problem we were up against. The look on Cramer’s face indicated that he was appreciating it too. The look was crossing my bow, direct at Wolfe.

  “Goodwin’s story,” Cramer growled. “I mean her story. What do you think?”

  Wolfe’s eyes came open a little. “What followed seems to support it. I doubt if she would have arranged for that”—he flipped a hand in the direction of the office across the hall—”just to corroborate a tale. I accept it. I credit it.”

  “Yeah. I don’t need to remind you that I know you well and I know Goodwin well. So I wonder how much chance there is that in a day or so you’ll suddenly remember that she had been here before today, or one or more of the others had, and you’ve got a client, and there was something leading up to this.”

  “Bosh,” Wolfe said dryly. “Even if it were like that, and it isn’t, you would be wasting time. Since you know us, you know we wouldn’t remember until we got ready to.”

  Cramer glowered. Two scientists came in from across the hall to report. Stebbins came to announce the arrival of an assistant district attorney. A dick came to relay a phone call from a deputy commissioner. Another dick came in to say that Homer Carlisle was raising hell in the front room. Meanwhile Wolfe sat with his eyes shut, but I got an idea of his state of mind from the fact that intermittently his forefinger was making little circles on the polished top of the table.

  Cramer looked at him. “What do you know,” he asked abruptly, “about the killing of that Doris Hatten?”

  “Newspaper accounts,” Wolfe muttered. “And what Mr. Stebbins has told Mr. Goodwin, casually.”

  “Casual is right.” Cramer got out a cigar, conveyed it to his mouth, and sank his teeth in it. He never lit one. “Those damn houses with self-service elevators are worse than walk-ups for a checking job. No one ever sees anyone coming or going. If you’re not interested, I’m talking to hear myself.”

  “I am interested.” Wolfe’s eyes stayed shut.

  “Good. I appreciate it. Even so, self-service elevator or not, the man who paid the rent for that apartment was lucky. He may have been clever and careful, but also he was lucky. Never to have anybody see him enough to give a description of him—that took luck.”

  “Possibly Miss Hatten paid the rent herself.”

  “Sure,” Cramer conceded, “she paid it all right, but where did she get it from? No visible means of support—he sure wasn’t visible, and three good men spent a month trying to start a trail, and one of them is still at it. There was no doubt about its being that kind of a setup; we did get that far. She had only been living there two months, and when we found out how well the man who paid for it had kept himself covered, as tight as a drum, we decided that maybe he had installed her there just for the purpose. That was why we gave it all we had. Another reason was that the papers started hinting that we knew who he was and that he was such a big shot we were sitting on the lid.”

  Cramer shifted his cigar one tooth over to the left. “That kind of thing used to get me sore, but what the hell, for newspapers that’s just routine. Big shot or not, he didn’t need us to do any covering for him—he had done too good a job himself. Now, if we’re to take it the way this Cynthia Brown gave it to Goodwin, it might have been the man who paid the rent and it might not. That makes it pie. I would hate to tell you what I think of the fact that Goodwin sat there in your office and was told right here on these premises and all he did was go upstairs and watch to see if anybody squeezed a flowerpot!”

  “You’re irritated,” I said charitably. “Not that he was on the premises, that he had been. Also I was taking it with salt. Also she was saving specifications for Mr. Wolfe. Also—”

  “Also I know you. How many of those two hundred and nineteen people were men?”

  “I would say a little over half.”

  “Then how do you like it?”

  “I hate it.”

  Wolfe grunted. “Judging from your attitude, Mr. Cramer, something that has occurred to me has not occurred to you.”
<
br />   “Naturally. You’re a genius. What is it?”

  “Something that Mr. Goodwin told us. I want to consider it a little.”

  “We could consider it together.”

  “Later. Those people in the front room are my guests. Can’t you dispose of them?”

  “One of your guests,” Cramer rasped, “was a beaut, all right.” He spoke to the dick by the door. “Bring in that woman—what’s her name? Carlisle.”

  IV

  Mrs. Homer N. Carlisle came in with all her belongings: her caracul coat, her gaily colored scarf, and her husband. Perhaps I should say that her husband brought her. As soon as he was through the door he strode across to the dining table and delivered a harangue. I don’t suppose Cramer had heard that speech, with variations, more than a thousand times. This time it was pretty offensive. Solid and broad-shouldered, Mr. Carlisle looked the part. His sharp dark eyes flashed, and his long gorilla-like arms were good for gestures. At the first opening Cramer, controlling himself, said he was sorry and asked them to sit down.

  Mrs. Carlisle did. Mr. Carlisle didn’t.

  “We’re nearly two hours late now,” he stated. “I know you have your duty to perform, but citizens have a few rights left, thank God. Our presence here is purely adventitious.” I would have been impressed by the adventitious if he hadn’t had so much time to think it up. “I warn you that if my name is published in connection with this miserable affair, a murder in the house of a private detective, I’ll make trouble. I’m in a position to. Why should it be? Why should we be detained? What if we had left five or ten minutes earlier, as others did?”

  “That’s not quite logical,” Cramer objected.

  “Why not?”

  “No matter when you left it would have been the same if your wife had acted the same. She discovered the body.”

  “By accident!”

  “May I say something, Homer?” the wife put in.

  “It depends on what you say.”

  “Oh,” Cramer said significantly.

  “What do you mean, oh?” Carlisle demanded.

  “I mean that I sent for your wife, not you, but you came with her, and that tells me why. You wanted to see to it that she wasn’t indiscreet.”

  “What the hell has she got to be indiscreet about?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently you do. If she hasn’t, why don’t you sit down and relax while I ask her a few questions?”

  “I would, sir,” Wolfe advised him. “You came in here angry, and you blundered. An angry man is a jackass.”

  It was a struggle for the executive vice-president, but he made it. He clamped his jaws and sat. Cramer went to the wife.

  “You wanted to say something, Mrs. Carlisle?”

  “Only that I’m sorry.” Her bony hands, the fingers twined, were on the table before her. “For the trouble I’ve caused.”

  “I wouldn’t say you caused it exactly—except for yourself and your husband.” Cramer was mild. “The woman was dead, whether you went in there or not. But, if only as a matter of form, it was essential for me to see you, since you discovered the body. That’s all there is to it as far as I know. There’s no question of your being involved more than that.”

  “How the hell could there be?” Carlisle blurted.

  Cramer ignored him. “Goodwin here saw you standing in the hall not more than two minutes, probably less, prior to the moment you screamed and ran out of the office. How long had you then been downstairs?”

  “We had just come down. I was waiting for my husband to get his things.”

  “Had you been downstairs before that?”

  “No—only when we came in.”

  “What time did you arrive?”

  “A little after three, I think—”

  “Twenty past three,” the husband put in.

  “Were you and your husband together all the time? Continuously?”

  “Of course. Well—you know how it is—he would want to look longer at something, and I would move on a little—”

  “Certainly we were,” Carlisle said irritably. “You can see why I made that remark about it depending on what she said. She has a habit of being vague. This is no time to be vague.”

  “I am not actually vague,” she protested with no heat, not to her husband but to Cramer. “It’s just that everything is relative. There would be no presence if there were no absence. There would be no innocence if there were no sin. Nothing can be cut off sharp from anything else. Who would have thought my wish to see Nero Wolfe’s office would link me with a horrible crime?”

  “My God!” Carlisle exploded. “Hear that? Link. Link!”

  “Why did you want to see Wolfe’s office?” Cramer inquired.

  “Why, to see the globe.”

  I gawked at her. I had supposed that naturally she would say it was curiosity about the office of a great and famous detective. Apparently Cramer reacted the same as me. “The globe?” he demanded.

  “Yes, I had read about it and I wanted to see how it looked. I thought a globe that size, three feet in diameter, would be fantastic in an ordinary room—Oh!”

  “Oh what?”

  “I didn’t see it!”

  Cramer nodded. “You saw something else instead. By the way, I forgot to ask, did you know her? Had you ever seen her before?”

  “You mean—her?”

  “Yes. Her name was Cynthia Brown.”

  “We had never known her or seen her or heard of her,” the husband declared.

  “Had you, Mrs. Carlisle?”

  “No.”

  “Of course she came as the guest of a Mrs. Orwin; she wasn’t a member of this flower club. Are you a member?”

  “My husband is.”

  “We both are,” Carlisle stated. “Vague again. It’s a joint membership. In my greenhouse at my country home I have over four thousand plants, including several hundred orchids.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Isn’t this about enough?”

  “Plenty,” Cramer conceded. “Thank you, both of you. We won’t bother you again unless we have to. Levy, pass them out.”

  Mrs. Carlisle got to her feet and moved off, but halfway to the door she turned. “I don’t suppose—would it be possible for me to look at the globe now? Just a peek?”

  “For God’s sake!” Her husband took her by the arm. “Come on. Come on!”

  When the door had closed behind them Cramer glared at me and then at Wolfe. “This is sure a sweet one,” he said grimly. “Say it’s within the range of possibility that Carlisle is it, and the way it stands right now, why not? So we look into him. We check back on him for six months, and try doing it without getting roars out of him—a man like that, in his position. However, it can be done—by three or four men in two or three weeks. Multiply that by what? How many men were here?”

  “Around a hundred and twenty,” I told him. “Ten dozen. But you’ll find that at least half of them are disqualified one way or another. As I told you, I took a survey. Say sixty.”

  “All right, multiply it by sixty. Do you care for it?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” Cramer took the cigar from his mouth, removed a nearly severed piece with his fingers and put it in an ashtray, and replaced the cigar with a fresh tooth-hold. “Of course,” he said sarcastically, “when she sat in there telling you about him the situation was different. You wanted her to enjoy being with you. You couldn’t reach for the phone and tell us you had a self-confessed crook who could put a quick finger on a murderer and let us come and take over—hell no! You had to save it for a fee for Wolfe! You had to sit and admire her legs!”

  “Don’t be vulgar,” I said severely.

  “You had to go upstairs and make a survey! You had to—Well?”

  Lieutenant Rowcliff had opened the door and entered. There were some city employees I liked, some I admired, some I had no feeling about, some I could have done without easy—and one whose ears I was going to twist someday. That was Rowcliff. He was tall, strong,
handsome, and a pain in the neck.

  “We’re all through in there, sir,” he said importantly. “We’ve covered everything. Nothing is being taken away, and it is all in order. We were especially careful with the contents of the drawers of Wolfe’s desk, and also we—”

  “My desk!” Wolfe roared.

  “Yes, your desk,” Rowcliff said precisely, smirking.

  The blood was rushing into Wolfe’s face.

  “She was killed there,” Cramer said gruffly. “She was strangled with something, and murderers have been known to hide things. Did you get anything at all?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rowcliff admitted. “Of course the prints have to be sorted, and there’ll be lab reports. How do we leave it?”

  “Seal it up and we’ll see tomorrow. You stay here and keep a photographer. The others can go. Tell Stebbins to send that woman in—Mrs. Irwin.”

  “Orwin, sir.”

  “I’ll see her.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rowcliff turned to go.

  “Wait a minute,” I objected. “Seal what up? The office?”

  “Certainly,” Rowcliff sneered.

  I said firmly, to Cramer, not to him, “You don’t mean it. We work there. We live there. All our stuff is there.”

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Cramer told Rowcliff, and he wheeled and went.

  I set my jaw. I was full of both feelings and words, but I knew they had to be held in. This was not for me. This was far and away the worst Cramer had ever pulled. It was up to Wolfe. I looked at him. The blood had gone back down again; he was white with fury, and his mouth was pressed to so tight a line that there were no lips.

  “It’s routine,” Cramer said aggressively.

  Wolfe said icily, “That’s a lie. It is not routine.”

  “It’s my routine—in a case like this. Your office is not just an office. It’s the place where more fancy tricks have been played than any other spot in New York. When a woman is murdered there, soon after a talk with Goodwin for which we have no word but his, I say sealing it is routine.”

  Wolfe’s head came forward an inch, his chin out. “No, Mr. Cramer. I’ll tell you what it is. It is the malefic spite of a sullen little soul and a crabbed and envious mind. It is the childish rancor of a primacy too often challenged and offended. It is the feeble wriggle—”