“She told me a lie, not a very good one. She said she had been there only once and hadn’t stayed long. She had left her umbrella there and had gone today to get it. The part about the umbrella was okay; it was there in a drawer and still is. She invited me to take her to lunch. She invited me to take her to the Flamingo tonight and dance till they close.”
“How do you know it was a lie, that she had been there only once?”
I shook my head. “You want too much for nothing. Just file it that I don’t think she lied; I know she did. And I know you know it too.”
“You do not.”
“Oh, nuts. Go climb a rope.”
Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “Mr. Hough. We have humored you, but our indulgence isn’t boundless. Your explanation.”
“What if I don’t give you one? What if I get up and walk out?”
“That would be a misfortune for both of us. Now that I know who you are I would be obliged to tell the police of your performance Monday afternoon, and I’d rather not, for reasons of my own. In that respect your interest runs with mine—and your wife’s. Her umbrella is still there.”
He was licked and he knew it. His face didn’t go gargoyle again, but his mouth twisted and the skin around his eyes was squeezed in as if the light was too strong.
“Circumstances,” he said. “Men are the sport of circumstances. Good God, as I sat in this chair talking to Goodwin, Yeager was dead, had been dead for hours. When I read it in the paper yesterday morning I knew how it would be if you found me, and I decided what to say; I was going to deny it, but now that won’t do.”
He nodded, slowly. “So. Circumstances. Of course my wife shouldn’t have married me. It was a circumstance that she met me at a moment when she was—but I won’t go into that. I’ll try to keep to the point. I was a fool to think that I might still save our marriage, but I did. She wanted things that I couldn’t supply, and she wanted to do things that I am not inclined to and not equipped for. She couldn’t do them with me, so she did them without me.”
“The point,” Wolfe said.
“Yes. This is the first time I have ever said a word about my relations with my wife to anyone. About a year ago she suddenly had a watch that must have cost a thousand dollars or more. Then other things—jewelry, clothes, a fur coat. She had frequently spent evenings out without me, but it became more than evenings; occasionally she came home after dawn. You realize that now that I’ve started it’s difficult to confine myself to the essentials.”
“Do so if possible.”
“I’ll try. I descended to snooping. Curiosity creeps into the homes of the unfortunate under the names of duty or pity. When my wife—”
“Is that Pascal?”
“No, Nietzsche. When my wife went out in the evening I followed her—not always, but when I could manage it. Mostly she went to a restaurant or the address of a friend I knew about, but twice she went to that address on Eighty-second Street and entered at the basement door. That was incomprehensible, in that kind of neighborhood, unless it was a dive of some sort—dope or God knows what. I went there one afternoon and pushed the button at the basement door, but learned nothing. I am not a practiced investigator like you. A man, I think a Puerto Rican, told me only that he had no vacant rooms.”
He stopped to swallow. “I also snooped at home, and one day I found a phone number that my wife had scribbled on the back of an envelope. Chisholm five, three-two-three-two. I dialed it and learned that it was the residence of Thomas G. Yeager. It wasn’t listed. I made inquiries and found out who he was, and I saw him, more by luck than design. Do you want to know how it happened?”
“No. You met him?”
“No, I saw him at a theater. That was two weeks ago. And three days later, Friday, a week ago last Friday, I followed her when she went out, and she went again, that was the third time, to that house on Eighty-second Street. I went and stood across the street, and very soon, not more than five minutes, Yeager came, walking. It was still daylight. He turned in, to the basement entrance, and entered. What would you have done?”
Wolfe grunted. “I wouldn’t have been there.”
Hough turned to me. “What would you have done, Goodwin?”
“That’s irrelevant,” I said. “I’m not you. You might as well ask what I would do if I were a robin and saw a boy robbing my nest. What did you do?”
“I walked up and down the block until people began to notice me, and then went home. My wife came home at six o’clock. I didn’t ask her where she had been; I hadn’t asked her that for a year. But I decided I must do something. I considered various things, various plans, and rejected them. I finally settled on one Sunday evening. We had had dinner—”
“Which Sunday?”
“Last Sunday. Three days ago. We had had dinner at a restaurant and returned home. My wife was watching television, and I was in my room working, only I wasn’t working. I was deciding what to do, and the next day I did it. I came here and saw Archie Goodwin. You know what I said to him.”
“Yes. Do you think you’ve accounted for it?”
“I suppose not. It was like this: I knew that when Yeager didn’t turn up Goodwin would find out why, either phone him—that was why I gave him the number—or go to the house. He would want to see Yeager, and he would tell him about me and what I had said. So Yeager would know that someone, someone he wouldn’t identify from Goodwin’s description, knew about his going to that house. He would know that Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe also knew about it. And he would tell my wife about it and describe me to her, and she would know I knew. That was the most important. I couldn’t tell her, but I wanted her to know that I knew.”
His eyes came to me and returned to Wolfe. “Another thing. I knew that Archie Goodwin wouldn’t just dismiss it from his mind. He would wonder why I had mentioned that particular address, and he would wonder what secret connection there might be between Yeager and that house in that neighborhood, and when Archie Goodwin wonders about anything he finds out. All of this was in my mind, but the most important was that my wife would know that I knew.”
His mouth worked, and he gripped the chair arms. “And that evening on the radio, the eleven-o’clock news, I learned that Yeager was dead, and yesterday morning in the paper I learned that he had died, had been murdered, Sunday night, and his body had been found in a hole in front of that house. Thank God my wife wasn’t there Sunday night.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Certainly I’m sure. We sleep in separate beds, but when she turns over I hear her. You realize—” He stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was going to say you realize that I have told you things I wouldn’t have thought I could possibly ever tell anybody, but you don’t care about that. Perhaps I have blundered again, but I was trapped by circumstance. Is there any chance, any chance at all, that it will stay with you? I can’t ask you for any consideration, I know that, after the way I imposed on Goodwin Monday afternoon. But if you could find it possible …”
Wolfe looked up at the clock. “It’s my dinnertime. It doesn’t please me to hurt a man needlessly, Mr. Hough, and your puerile imposition on Mr. Goodwin doesn’t rankle. On the contrary; you gave him that address and he went there, and as a result we have a client.” He pushed his chair back and rose. “What you have told us will be divulged only if it becomes requisite.”
“Who is your client?”
When Wolfe said that was hardly his concern, he didn’t try to insist. I permitted myself to feel sorry for him again as he left the chair. He was in a hell of a spot. He wanted to see his wife, he had to see her, but what was he going to say? Was he going to explain that he was responsible for her finding a reception committee when she went to get her umbrella? Was he going to admit—I turned that switch off. He had married her, I hadn’t. When I went to the front to let him out, I stood on the stoop for a minute to see if there was someone around who was curious enough about him to follow him. There wasn�
��t. I shut the door and went to join Wolfe in the dining room.
The two letters in the morning mail hadn’t been answered, and when we returned to the office after dinner and had finished coffee we attended to them. One was from a Putnam County farmer asking how many starlings he wanted this year, and the other was from a woman in Nebraska saying that she would be in New York for a week late in June, with her husband and two children, and could they come and look at the orchids. The reply to the first was forty; Wolfe always invites two dinner guests for the starling pie. The reply to the second was no; she shouldn’t have mentioned the children. When the answers had been typed and Wolfe had signed them, he sat and watched while I folded them and put them in the envelopes, and then spoke.
“Your exclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Perez is no longer valid. They knew they would get the house.”
Of course I had known that was coming. I swiveled. “It’s a funny thing about the Bible. I haven’t been to church for twenty years, and modern science has proved that heaven is two hundred degrees Fahrenheit hotter than hell, but if I was asked to put my hand on a Bible and swear to a lie, I’d dodge. I’d say I was a Hindu or a Buddhist—Zen, of course. And Mr. and Mrs. Perez undoubtedly go to mass once a week and probably oftener.”
“Pfui. To get a house, perhaps not; but to save their skins?”
I nodded. “Thousands of murderers have lied under oath on the witness stand, but this was different. They still sort of think I’m their detective.”
“You’re incorrigibly mulish.”
“Yes, sir. Same to you.”
“Nor is that imbecile Hough excluded. I call him an imbecile, but what if he is in fact subtle, wily, and adroit? Knowing or suspecting that his wife was going to that address Sunday evening, he got her keys, went there himself, killed Yeager, and left. Monday something alarmed him, no matter what; perhaps he told his wife what he had done, or she guessed, and her attitude brought dismay. He decided he must take some action that would make it seem highly unlikely that he had been implicated, and he did. You and I concluded yesterday that the impostor had not known Yeager was dead—not an assumption, a conclusion. We now abandon it.”
“It’s not incredible,” I conceded. “I see only three holes in it.”
“I see four, but none of them is beyond patching. I’m not suggesting that we have advanced; indeed, we have taken a step backward. We had concluded that that man was eliminated, but he isn’t. And now?”
We discussed it for two solid hours. By the time we went up to bed, toward midnight, it looked very much as if we had a case and a client, two clients, and we didn’t hold one single card that we were in a position to play. Our big ace, that we knew about that room and that Yeager had been killed in it, was absolutely worthless. And the longer we kept it up our sleeve, the more ticklish it would be when the police found a trail to it, as they were bound to sooner or later. When Wolfe left for his elevator he was so sour that he didn’t say good night. As I undressed I was actually weighing the chance, if we called Fred off, that the cops wouldn’t pry it loose that we had been there. That was so ridiculous that I turned over three times before I got to sleep.
The phone rang.
I understand that some people, when the phone rings in the middle of the night, surface immediately and are almost awake by the time they get it to their ear. I don’t. I am still way under. I couldn’t possibly manage anything as complicated as “Nero Wolfe’s residence, Archie Goodwin speaking.” The best I can do is “ ‘Lo.”
A woman said, “I want to talk to Mr. Archie Goodwin.” I was still fighting my way up.
“This is Goodwin. Who is this?”
“I am Mrs. Cesar Perez. You must come. Come now. Our daughter Maria is dead. She was killed with a gun. Will you come now?”
I was out from under. “Where are you?” I reached for the switch of the bed light and glanced at the clock. Twenty-five to three.
“We are at home. They took us to look at her, and we are just come back. Will you come?”
“Is anybody there? Policemen?”
“No. One brought us home, but he is gone. Will you come?”
“Yes. Right away. As fast as I can make it. If you haven’t already—”
She hung up.
I like to take my time dressing, but I am willing to make an exception when necessary. When my tie was tied and my jacket on, and my things were in my pockets, I tore a sheet from my notebook and wrote on it:
Maria Perez is dead, murdered, shot—not at home, I don’t know where. Mrs. P. phoned at 2:35. I’m on my way to 82nd Street.
AG
Down one flight I went to the door of Wolfe’s room and slipped the note through the crack at the bottom. Then on down, and out. At that time of night Eighth Avenue would be the best bet for a taxi, so I headed east.
Chapter 11
It was one minute after three when I used my key at the basement door at 156 and entered. Mrs. Perez was standing there. Saying nothing, she turned and walked down the hall, and I followed. Halfway along she turned into a room on the right, the door of which I had pushed open Tuesday evening when I felt an eye on me. It was a small room; a single bed, a chest of drawers, a little table with a mirror, and a couple of chairs didn’t leave much space. Perez was on the chair by the table, and on the table was a glass and a bottle of rum. As I entered he slowly lifted his head to look at me. The eye that he half closed in emergencies was nearly shut.
He spoke. “My wife told you that day we sit down with friends. Are you a friend?”
“Don’t mind him,” she said. “He drinks rum, half a bottle. I tell him to.” She sat on the bed. “I make him come to this room, our daughter’s room, and I bring him rum. I sit on our daughter’s bed. That chair is for you. We thank you for coming, but now we don’t know why. You can’t do anything, nobody can do anything, not even the good God Himself.”
Perez picked up the glass, took a swallow, put the glass down, and said something in Spanish.
I sat on the chair. “The trouble with a time like this,” I said, “is that there is something to do, and the quicker the better. You have no room in you right now for anything except that she’s dead, but I have. I want to know who killed her, and you will too when the shock eases up a little. And in order—”
“You’re crazy,” Perez said. “I’ll kill him.”
“He’s a man,” she told me. I thought for a second she meant that a man had killed Maria and then realized that she meant her husband.
“We’ll have to find him first,” I said. “Do you know who killed her?”
“You’re crazy,” Perez said. “Of course not.”
“They took you to look at her. Where? The morgue?”
“A big building,” she said. “A big room with strong light. She was on a thing with a sheet on her. There was blood on her head but not on her face.”
“Did they tell you who found her and where?”
“Yes. A man found her at a dock by the river.”
“What time did she leave the house and where did she go and who with?”
“She left at eight o’clock to go to a movie with friends.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Girls. Two girls came for her. We saw them. We know them. We went with a policeman to see one of them, and she said Maria went with them to the movie but she left about nine o’clock. She didn’t know where she went.”
“Have you any idea where she went?”
“No.”
“Have you any idea who killed her or why?”
“No. They asked us all these questions.”
“They’ll ask a lot more. All right, this is how it stands. Either there is some connection between her death and Mr. Yeager’s death or there isn’t. If there isn’t, it’s up to the police and they’ll probably nail him. Or her. If there is, the police can’t even get started because they don’t know this was Yeager’s house—unless you’ve told them. Have you?”
“No,” she said.
&nb
sp; “You’re crazy,” he said. He took a swallow of rum.
“Then it’s up to you. If you tell them about Yeager and that room, they may find out who killed Maria sooner than I would. Mr. Wolfe and I. If you don’t tell them, we’ll find him, but I don’t know how long it will take us. I want to make it clear: If her death had nothing to do with Yeager, it won’t hamper the police any not to know about him and that room, so it wouldn’t help to tell them. That’s that. So the question is, what do you want to do if it did have something to do with Yeager? Do you want to tell the police about him and the house, and probably be charged with killing Yeager? Or do you want to leave it to Mr. Wolfe and me?”
“If we had gone away last night,” Mrs. Perez said. “She didn’t want to. If I had been strong enough—”
“Don’t say that,” he commanded her. “Don’t say that!”
“It’s true, Cesar.” She got up and went and poured rum in his glass, and returned to the bed. She looked at me. “She never had anything with Mr. Yeager. She never spoke to him. She never was in that room. She knew nothing about all that, about him and the people that came.”
“I don’t believe it,” I declared. “It’s conceivable that an intelligent girl her age wouldn’t be curious about what was going on in the house she lived in, but I don’t believe it. Where was she Sunday night when you took Yeager’s body out and put it in the hole?”
“She was in her bed asleep. This bed I’m sitting on.”
“You thought she was. She had good ears. She heard me enter the house Tuesday evening. When I came down the hall the door to this room was open a crack and she was in here in the dark, looking at me through the crack.”
“You’re crazy,” Perez said.
“Maria wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“But she did. I opened the door and we spoke, just a few words. Why shouldn’t she do it? A beautiful, intelligent girl, not interested in what was happening in her own house? That’s absurd. The point is this: If you’re not going to tell the police about Yeager, if you’re going to leave it to Mr. Wolfe and me, I’ve got to find out what she knew, and what she did or said, that made someone want to kill her. Unless I can do that there’s no hope of getting anywhere. Obviously I won’t get it from you. Have the police done any searching here?”
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