Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19

by Murder by the Book

  He shivered.

  “I’m sorry to upset you, but maple-nut sundaes are—”

  “Shut up,” he growled.

  All the same, I was quite aware that it was up to me. True, Saul and Fred and Orrie were out collecting, but they were even farther away from Joan Wellman than I was, and that was some distance. If one of those ten females, or one of the other six whom I hadn’t met, had just one measly little fact tucked away that would start Wolfe’s lips pushing out and in, no one but me was going to dig it out, and if I didn’t want it to drag on into the Christmas season, only ten months away, I had better pull something.

  Back in the office after lunch, Wolfe was seated at his desk, reading a book of lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, his mind a million miles from murder, and I was wandering around trying to think of something to pull, when the phone rang and I went to answer it.

  A woman’s voice told me, “Mr. Corrigan would like to speak to Mr. Wolfe. Put Mr. Wolfe on, please?”

  I made a face. “Get home all right, Mrs. Adams?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Mr. Wolfe is busy reading poetry. Put Corrigan on.”

  “Really, Mr. Goodwin.”

  “I’m stubborner than you are, and you made the call, I didn’t. Put him on.” I covered the transmitter and told Wolfe, “Mr. James A. Corrigan, the senior partner.”

  Wolfe put the book down and took his instrument. I stayed on, as always when I wasn’t signaled to get off.

  “This is Nero Wolfe.”

  “This is Jim Corrigan. I’d like to have a talk with you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Not on the phone, Mr. Wolfe. It would be better to meet, and some of my associates would like to sit in. Would it be convenient for you to call at our office, say around five-thirty? One of my associates is in court.”

  “I don’t call at people’s offices, Mr. Corrigan. I stay in my office. I won’t be available at five-thirty, but six would do if you wish to come.”

  “Six would be all right, but it would be better to make it here. There will be four of us—perhaps five. Six o’clock here?”

  “No, sir. If at all, here.”

  “Hold the wire a minute.”

  It was more like three minutes. Then he was on again. “Sorry to keep you waiting. All right, we’ll be there at six or a little after.”

  Wolf cradled his phone, and I did likewise.

  “Well,” I remarked, “at least we touched a sore spot somewhere. That’s the first cheep we’ve got out of anybody in ten days.”

  Wolfe picked up his book.

  Chapter 11

  That was the biggest array of legal talent ever gathered in the office. Four counselors-at-law in good standing and one disbarred.

  James A. Corrigan (secretary, Charlotte Adams) was about the same age as his secretary, or maybe a little younger. He had the jaw of a prizefighter and the frame of a retired jockey and the hungriest pair of eyes I ever saw—not hungry the way a dog looks at a bone you’re holding up but the way a cat looks at a bird in a cage.

  Emmett Phelps (secretary, Sue Dondero) was a surprise to me. Sue had told me that he was the firm’s encyclopedia, the guy who knew all the precedents and references and could turn to them with his eyes shut, but he didn’t look it. Something over fifty, and a couple of inches over six feet, broad-shouldered and long-armed, on him a general’s or admiral’s uniform would have looked fine.

  Louis Kustin (secretary, Eleanor Gruber) was the youngster of the bunch, about my age. Instead of hungry eyes he had sleepy ones, very dark, but that must have been a cover because Sue had told me that he was their trial man, and hot, having taken over the tougher courtroom assignments when O’Malley had been disbarred. He looked smaller than he was on account of the way he slumped.

  Frederick Briggs, Helen Troy’s Uncle Fred, had white hair and a long bony face. If he had a secretary I hadn’t met her. From the way he blinked like a half-wit at everyone who spoke, it seemed a wonder he had been made a partner even in his seventh decade—or it could have been his eighth—but it takes all kinds to make a law firm. I wouldn’t have hired him to change blotters.

  Conroy O’Malley, who had been the senior partner and the courtroom wizard until he got bounced off the bar for bribing a juror, looked as bitter as you would expect, with a sidewise twist to his mouth that seemed to be permanent. With his mouth straightened and the sag out of his cheeks and a flash in his eye, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine him dominating a courtroom, but as he was then he couldn’t have dominated a phone booth with him alone in it.

  I had allotted the red leather chair to Corrigan, the senior partner, with the others in an irregular arc facing Wolfe’s desk. Usually, when there are visitors, I don’t get out my notebook and pen until Wolfe says to, but there was no law against my trying an experiment, so I had them ready and when Corrigan opened up I began scribbling. The reaction was instantaneous and unanimous. They all yapped at once, absolutely horrified and outraged. I looked astonished.

  Wolfe, who knows me fairly well, thought he was going to slip me a caustic remark, but he had to chuckle. The idea of getting the goats of four lawyers and one ex-lawyer at one crack appealed to him too.

  “I don’t think,” he told me mildly, “we’ll need a record of this.”

  I put the notebook on my desk in easy reach. They didn’t like it there so handy. Throughout the conference they took turns darting glances at me to make sure I wasn’t sneaking in some symbols.

  “This is a confidential private conversation,” Corrigan stated.

  “Yes, sir,” Wolfe conceded. “But not privileged. I am not your client.”

  “Quite right.” Corrigan smiled, but his eyes stayed hungry. “We wouldn’t mind if you were. We are not a hijacking firm, Mr. Wolfe, but I don’t need to say that if you ever need our services it would be a pleasure and an honor.”

  Wolfe inclined his head an eighth of an inch. I raised a brow the same distance. So they had brought butter along.

  “I’ll come straight to the point,” Corrigan declared. “Last evening you got more than half of our office staff down here and tried to seduce them.”

  “Seduction in its statutory sense, Mr. Corrigan?”

  “No, no, of course not. Orchids, liquors, exotic foods—not to tempt their chastity but their discretion. Administered by your Mr. Goodwin.”

  “I take the responsibility for Mr. Goodwin’s actions on my premises as my agent. Are you charging me with a malum? In se or prohibitum?”

  “Not at all. Neither. Perhaps I started badly. I’ll describe the situation as we see it, and you correct me if I’m wrong. A man named Wellman has engaged you to investigate the death of his daughter. You have decided that there is a connection between her death and two others, those of Leonard Dykes and Rachel Abrams. In—”

  “Not decided. Assumed as a working hypothesis.”

  “All right. And you’re working on it. You have two reasons for the assumption: the appearance of the name Baird Archer in all three cases, and the fact that all three died violently. The second is merely coincidental and would have no significance without the first. Looked at objectively, it doesn’t seem like a very good reason. We suspect you’re concentrating on this assumption because you can’t find anything else to concentrate on, but of course we may be wrong.”

  “No. You’re quite right.”

  They exchanged glances. Phelps, the six-foot-plus encyclopedia, muttered something I didn’t catch. O’Malley, the ex, was the only one who didn’t react at all. He was too busy being bitter.

  “Naturally,” Corrigan said reasonably, “we can’t expect you to spread your cards out. We didn’t come here to question you, we came to let you question us.”

  “About what?”

  “Any and all relevant matters. We’re willing to spread our cards out, Mr. Wolfe; we have to. Frankly, our firm is in a highly vulnerable position. We’ve had all the scandal we can absorb. Only a little over a year ago our senior
partner was disbarred and narrowly escaped a felony conviction. That was a major blow to the firm. We reorganized, months passed, we were regaining lost ground, and then our chief confidential clerk, Leonard Dykes, was murdered, and it was all reopened. There was never a shred of evidence that there was any connection between O’Malley’s disbarment and Dykes’s death, but it doesn’t take evidence to make scandal. It affected us even more seriously than the first blow; the effect was cumulative. Weeks went by, and Dykes’s murder was still unsolved, and it was beginning to die down a little, when suddenly it came back on us through the death of someone we had never heard of, a young woman named Joan Wellman. However, that was much less violent and damaging. It was confined mostly to an effort by the police to find some trace, through us or our staff, of a man who was named Baird Archer, or who had used that name, and the effort was completely unsuccessful. After a week of that it was petering out too, and then here they came again, we didn’t know why at the time, but now we know it was because of the death of another young woman we had never heard of, named Rachel Abrams. At that point don’t you think we had a right to feel a little persecuted?”

  Wolfe shrugged. “I doubt if it matters what I think. You did feel persecuted.”

  “We certainly did. We do. We have had enough. As you know, the Abrams girl died three days ago. Again what the police are after is a trace of a Baird Archer, though God knows if there were any trace of such a man or such a name at our office they should have dug it up long ago. Anyhow, there’s nothing we can do except hope they find their damned Baird Archer, and wait for this to begin to die down too. That’s how we felt yesterday. Do you know what happened in court this afternoon? Louis Kustin was trying an important case for us, and during a recess opposing counsel came up to him and said—what did he say, Louis?”

  Kustin stirred in his chair. “He asked me what I was doing about a new connection when our firm dissolves.” His voice had a sharp edge, not at all sleepy like his eyes. “He was trying to get me sore to spoil my style. He didn’t succeed.”

  “You see,” Corrigan told Wolfe. “Well, that’s how we felt yesterday. Then those boxes of orchids came with notes from your man Goodwin. Then today we learn what happened last night. We learn what happened here, and we also learn that Goodwin told one of our staff that you have an idea that a trail to the murderer of the Wellman girl can be picked up at our office, that he never saw you more bullheaded about an idea, and that your client and you both intend to go the limit. We know enough about you and your methods to know what that means. As long as you’ve got that idea you’ll never let go. The police and the talk may die down and even die out, but you won’t, and God knows what you’ll do to our staff. You’ve damn near got them scratching and pulling hair already.”

  “Nuts,” I cut in. “They’ve been at it for months.”

  “They were cooling off. You got ’em tight and then brought in a bereaved father and mother to work on their nerves. God only knows what you’ll do next.” Corrigan returned to Wolfe. “So here we are. Ask us anything you want to. You say that idea is a working hypothesis, go ahead and work on it. You’re investigating the murder of Joan Wellman, and you think one of us has something for you, maybe all of us. Here we are. Get it over with.”

  Corrigan looked at me and asked politely, “Could I have a drink of water?”

  I took it for granted that he meant with something in it and asked him what, meanwhile pushing a button for Fritz, since I wasn’t supposed to leave a conference unless I had to. Also I broadened the invitation. Two of them liked Scotch, two bourbon, and one rye. They exchanged remarks. Briggs, the blinking half-wit, got up to stretch and crossed the room for a look at the big globe, probably with the notion of trying to find out where he was. I noticed that Wolfe did not order beer, which seemed to be stretching things pretty thin. I had nothing against his habit of using reasonable precaution not to take refreshment with a murderer, but he had never seen any of those birds before and he had absolutely nothing to point at them with. Bullheaded was putting it mildly.

  Corrigan put his half-empty glass down and said, “Go ahead.”

  Wolfe grunted. “As I understand it, sir, you invite me to ask questions and satisfy myself that my assumption is not valid. That could take all night. I’m sorry, but my dinner dish this evening is not elastic.”

  “We’ll go out and come back.”

  “And I can’t commit myself to satisfaction by an hour or even a day.”

  “We don’t expect a commitment. We just want to get you off our necks as soon as possible without having our organization and our reputation hurt worse than they are already.”

  “Very well. Here’s a question. Which one of you first suggested this meeting with me?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I’m asking the questions, Mr. Corrigan.”

  “So you are. It was—” The senior partner hesitated. “Yes, it was Phelps.”

  “No,” Phelps contradicted him. “You came to my room and asked me what I thought of it.”

  “Then it was you, Fred?”

  Briggs blinked. “I really couldn’t say, Jim. I make so many suggestions, I may well have made this one. I know Louis phoned in at his lunch recess to ask for some figures, and we were discussing it.”

  “That’s right,” Kustin agreed. “You said it was being considered.”

  “You’re having a hell of a time answering a simple question,” a biting voice told them. It was Conroy O’Malley, the ex. “The suggestion came from me. I phoned you around eleven o’clock, Jim, and you told me about Nero Wolfe smashing in, and I said the only thing to do was have a talk with him.”

  Corrigan screwed up his lips. “That’s right. Then I went in to get Emmett’s opinion.”

  Wolfe went at O’Malley. “You phoned Mr. Corrigan around eleven this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about?”

  “To get the news. I had been out of town for a week, and the minute I returned the police had got at me again about Baird Archer. I wondered why.”

  “What were you doing out of town?”

  “I was in Atlanta, Georgia, getting facts about the delivery of steel for a bridge.”

  “On behalf of whom?”

  “This firm.” O’Malley’s mouth twisted until it was distorted almost to a diagonal. “You don’t think my old associates would let me starve, do you? No indeed. I eat every day. Not only do I get a share of the income from unfinished business when I left, I am also given work to do outside the office. Do you know what is the outstanding characteristic of my former associates? Love for their fellow man.” He tapped his chest with a forefinger. “I am their fellow man.”

  “Goddam it, Con,” Phelps blurted, “where does that get you? What do you want? What do you expect?”

  A gleam had come and gone in Kustin’s sleepy eyes as O’Malley spoke. He said dryly, “We’re here to answer Wolfe’s questions. Let’s keep the answers responsive.”

  “No,” Wolfe said, “this isn’t a courtroom. Sometimes an unresponsive answer is the most revealing, almost as good as a lie. But I hope you will resort to lies as little as possible, since they will be of use to me only when exposed and that’s a lot of work. For instance, I am going to ask each of you if you have ever tried your hand at writing fiction or had a marked and sustained desire to write fiction. If you all say no, and if later, through interviews with friends and acquaintances, I find that one of you lied, that will be of some value to me, but it will save trouble if you’ll tell the truth short of serious embarrassment. Have you ever tried writing fiction, Mr. O’Malley? Or wanted to, beyond a mere whim?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Briggs?”

  “No.”

  He got five noes.

  Wolfe leaned back and surveyed them. “Of course,” he said, “it is clearly essential to my assumption that either Leonard Dykes or someone he knew wrote a piece of fiction long enough to be called a novel—Dykes
himself by preference, since he was killed. Doubtless the police have touched on this in questioning you, and you have disclaimed any knowledge of such an activity by Dykes, but I like things firsthand. Mr. Corrigan, have you ever had any information or hint, from any source, that Dykes had written, was writing, or wanted or intended to write, a work of fiction?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Phelps?”

  Five noes again.

  Wolfe nodded. “That shows why, even if you put up with this for a solid week, I can’t engage not to harass your staff. For that kind of operation Mr. Goodwin is highly qualified. If you admonish those young women not to see him, I doubt if it will work. If they disobey and you fire them, you will merely make them riper for him. If you warn them specifically that any knowledge they may have, however slight, of Dykes’s literary performances or ambitions is not to be disclosed, sooner or later Mr. Goodwin will know it, and I shall ask why you don’t want me to get facts. And if any of them does innocently have such knowledge, perhaps from some remark once heard, we’ll get it.”

  They didn’t care for that. Louis Kustin was displaying a bored smile. “We’re not schoolboys, Wolfe. We graduated long ago. Speaking for myself, you’re welcome to any fact you can get, no matter what, that’s conceivably connected with your case. I don’t know any. I’m here—all of us are—to satisfy you on that point.”

  “Then tell me this, Mr. Kustin.” Wolfe was placid. “I gather that although the disbarment of Mr. O’Malley was a blow to the firm’s reputation, you personally benefited from it by being made a partner and by replacing Mr. O’Malley as chief trial counsel. Is that correct?”

  Kustin’s eyes woke up. They gleamed. “I deny that that has any connection with your case.”

  “We’re proceeding on my assumption. Of course you may decline to answer, but if you do, what are you here for?”

  “Answer him, Louis,” O’Malley said jeeringly. “Just say yes.”

  They looked at each other. I doubt if either of them had ever regarded opposing counsel with just that kind of hostility. Then Kustin’s eyes, anything but sleepy now, returned to Wolfe and he said, “Yes.”