by Rex Stout
“My name’s Goodwin. What’s yours?”
“Johnson.”
“Do you want to stay here all night, Mr Johnson?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I think this woman was murdered, and if the police do too you know what that means, so the sooner they get here the better. I’m a licensed private detective and I ought to stay with the body. There’s a phone on a stand in the reception hall. The number is Spring seven-three-one-hundred.”
“Right.” He headed for the arch. When Mrs Robilotti commanded him to halt and moved to head him off he just side-stepped her and went on, not bothering to argue, and she called to her men, “Robbie! Cecil! Stop him!”
When they failed to react she wheeled to me. “Leave my house!”
“I would love to,” I told her. “If I did, the cops would soon bring me back. Nobody is going to leave your house for a while.”
Robilotti was there, taking her arm. “It’s no use, Louise. It’s horrible, but it’s no use. Come and sit down.” He looked at me. “Why do you think she was murdered? Why do you say that?”
Paul Schuster, the promising young lawyer, spoke up. “I was going to ask that, Goodwin. She had a bottle of poison in her bag.”
“How do you know she did?”
“One of the guests told me. Miss Varr.”
“One of them told me too. That’s why I asked Miss Tuttle to guard the bag. I still think she was murdered, but I’ll save my reason for the police. You people might-”
Celia Grantham came running in, calling, “How is she?” and came on, stopping beside me, looking down at Faith Usher. “My God,” she said, whispered, and seized my arm and demanded, “Why don’t you do something?” She looked down again, her mouth hanging open, and I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her around. “Thanks,” she said. “My God, she was so pretty. Is she dead?”
“Yes. Did you get a doctor?”
“Yes, he’s coming. I couldn’t get ours. I got-What good is a doctor if she’s dead?”
“Nobody is dead until a doctor says so. It’s a law.” Some of the others were jabbering, and I turned and raised my voice. “You people might as well rest your legs and there are plenty of chairs, but stay away from the one the bag is on. If you want to leave the room I can’t stop you, but I advise you not to. The police might misunderstand it, and you’d only have more questions to answer.” A buzzer sounded and Hackett was going, but I stopped him. “No, Hackett, you’d better stay, you’re one of us now. Mr Johnson will let them in.”
He was doing so. There was no sound of the door opening because doors on mansions do not make noises, but there were voices in the reception hall, and everybody turned to face the arch. In they came, a pair, two precinct men in uniform. They marched in and stopped, and one of them asked, “Mr Robert Robilotti?”
“I’m Robert Robilotti,” he said.
“This your house? We got-”
“No,” Mrs Robilotti said. “It’s my house.”
Chapter Four
When I mounted the seven steps of the stoop of the old brownstone at twelve minutes after seven Wednesday morning and let myself in, I was so pooped that I was going to drop my topcoat and hat on the hall bench, but breeding told, and I put the coat on a hanger and the hat on a shelf and went to the kitchen.
Fritz, at the refrigerator, turned and actually left the refrigerator door open to stare at me.
“Behold!” he said. He had told me once that he had got that out of his French-English dictionary, many years ago, as a translation of voila.
“I want,” I said, “a quart of orange juice, a pound of sausage, six eggs, twenty griddle cakes, and a gallon of coffee.”
“No doughnuts with honey?”
“Yes. I forgot to mention them.” I dropped on to the chair I occupy at breakfast, groaning. “Speaking of honey, if you want to make a friend who will never fail you, you might employ the eggs in a hedgehog omelet, with plenty-No. It would take too long. Just fry ’em.”
“I never fry eggs.” He was stirring a bowl of batter. “You have had a night?”
“I have. A murder with all the trimmings.”
“Ah! Terrible! A client, then?”
I do not pretend to understand Fritz’s attitude towards murder. He deplores it. To him the idea of one human being killing another is insupportable; he has told me so, and he meant it. But he never has the slightest interest in the details, not even who the victim was, or the murderer, and if I try to tell him about any of the fine points it just bores him. Beyond the bare fact that again a human being has done something insupportable, the only question he wants answered is whether we have a client.
“No client,” I told him.
“There may be one, if you were there. Have you had nothing to eat?”
“No. Three hours ago they offered to get me a sandwich at the District Attorney’s office, but my stomach said no. It preferred to wait for something that would stay down.” He handed me a glass of orange juice. “Many, many thanks. That sausage smells marvellous.”
He didn’t like to talk or listen when he was actually cooking, even something as simple as broiling sausage, so I picked up the Times, there on my table as usual, and gave it a look. A murder has to be more than run-of-the-mill to make the front page of the Times, but this one certainly qualified, having occurred at the famous unmarried-mothers party at the home of Mrs Robert Robilotti, and it was there, with a three-column lead on the bottom half of the page, carried over to page 23. But the account didn’t amount to much, since it had happened so late, and there were no pictures, not even of me. That settled, I propped the paper on the reading rack and tackled a sausage and griddle cake.
I was arranging two poached eggs on the fourth cake when the house phone buzzed, and I reached for it and said good morning and had Wolfe’s voice.
“So you’re here. When did you get home?”
“Half an hour ago. I’m eating breakfast. I suppose it was on the seven-thirty newscast.”
“Yes. I just heard it. As you know, I dislike the word ‘newscast’. Must you use it?”
“Correction. Make it the seven-thirty radio news broadcast. I don’t feel like arguing, and my cake is getting cold.”
“You will come up when you have finished.”
I said I would. When I had cradled the phone Fritz asked if he was in humour, and I said I didn’t know and didn’t give a damn. I was still sore at myself.
I took my time with the meal, treating myself to three cups of coffee instead of the usual two, and was taking the last swallow when Fritz returned from taking up the breakfast tray. I put the cup down, got up, had a stretch and a yawn, went to the hall, mounted the flight of stairs in no hurry, turned left, tapped on a door, and was told to come in.
Entering, I blinked. The morning sun was streaking in and glancing off the vast expanse of Wolfe’s yellow pyjamas. He was seated at a table by a window, barefooted, working on a bowl of fresh figs with cream. When I was listing the cash requirements of the establishment I might have mentioned that fresh figs in March, by air from Chile, are not hay.
He gave me a look. “You are dishevelled,” he stated.
“Yes, sir. Also disgruntled. Also disslumbered. Did the broadcast say she was murdered?”
“No. That she died of poison and the police are investigating. Your name was not mentioned. Are you involved?”
“Up to my chin. I had been told by a friend of hers that she had a bottle of cyanide in her bag, and I was keeping an eye on her. We were together in the drawing-room, dancing, all twelve of us, not counting the butler and the band, when a man brought her a glass of champagne, and she took a gulp, and in eight minutes she was dead. It was cyanide, that’s established, and the way it works it had to be in the champagne, but she didn’t put it there. I was watching her, and I’m the one that says she didn’t. Most of the others, maybe all of them, would like to have it that she did. Mrs Robilotti would like to choke me, and some of the others would be
glad to lend a hand. A suicide at her party would be bad enough, but a homicide is murder. So I’m involved.”
He swallowed a bite of fig. “You are indeed. I suppose you considered whether it would be well to reserve your conclusion.”
I appreciated that-his not questioning my eyesight or my faculty of attention. It was a real tribute, and the way I felt, I needed one. I said, “Sure I considered it. But I had to include that I had been told she had cyanide in her bag, since the girl who told me would certainly include it, and Cramer and Stebbins and Rowcliff would know damn well that in that case I would have had my eyes open, so I had no choice. I couldn’t tell them yes, I was watching her and the bag, and yes, I was looking at her when Grantham took her the champagne and she drank it, and yes, she might have put something in the champagne before she drank when I was absolutely certain she hadn’t.”
“No,” he agreed. He had finished the figs and taken one of the ramekins of shirred eggs with sausage from the warmer. “Then you’re in for it. I take it that we expect no profitable engagement.”
“We do not. God knows, not from Mrs Robilotti.”
“Very well.” He put a muffin in the toaster. “You may remember my remarks yesterday.”
“I do. You said I would demean myself. You did not say I would get involved in an unprofitable homicide. I’ll deposit the cheques this morning.”
He said I should go to bed, and I said if I did it would take a guided missile to get me up again.
After a shower and shave and tooth brush, and clean shirt and socks, and a walk to the bank and back, I began to think I might last the day out. I had three reasons for making the trip to the bank: first, people die, and if the signer of a cheque dies before the cheque reaches his bank the bank won’t pay it; second, I wanted air; and third, I had been told at the District Attorney’s office to keep myself constantly available, and I wanted to uphold my constitutional freedom of movement. However, the issue wasn’t raised, for when I returned Fritz told me that the only phone call had been from Lon Cohen of the Gazette.
Lon has done us various favours over the years, and besides, I like him, so I gave him a ring. What he wanted was an eye-witness story of the last hours of Faith Usher, and I told him I’d think it over and let him know. His offer was five hundred bucks, which would have been not for Nero Wolfe but for me, since my presence at the party had been strictly personal, and of course he pressed-journalists always press-but I stalled him. The bait was attractive, five C’s and my picture in the paper, but I would have to include the climax, and if I reported that exactly as it happened, letting the world know that I was the one obstacle to calling it suicide, I would have everybody on my neck from the District Attorney to the butler. I was regretfully deciding that I would have to pass when the phone rang, and I answered it and had Celia Grantham’s voice. She wanted to know if I was alone. I told her yes but I wouldn’t be in six minutes, when Wolfe would descend from the plant rooms.
“It won’t take that long.” Her voice was croaky, but not necessarily from drink. Like all the rest of them, including me, she had done a lot of talking in the past twelve hours. “Not if you’ll answer a question. Will you?”
“Ask it.”
“Something you said last night when I wasn’t there-when I was phoning for a doctor. My mother says that you said you thought Faith Usher was murdered. Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you say it? That’s the question.”
“Because I thought it.”
“Please don’t be smart, Archie. Why did you think it?”
“Because I had to. I was forced to by circumstances. If you think I’m dodging, I am. I would like to oblige a girl who dances as well as you do, but I’m not going to answer your question-not now. I’m sorry, but nothing doing.”
“Do you still think she was murdered?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
I don’t hang up on people. I thought I might have to that time, but she finally gave up, just as Wolfe’s elevator jolted to a stop at the bottom. He entered, crossed to his chair behind his desk, got his bulk arranged in it to his satisfaction, glanced through the mail, looked at his calendar, and leaned back to read a three-page letter from an orchid-hunter in New Guinea. He was on the third page when the doorbell rang. I got up and stepped to the hall, saw, through the one-way glass panel of the front door, a burly frame and a round red face, and went and opened the door.
“Good Lord,” I said, “don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not much,” he said, crossing the sill.
I got the collar of his coat as he shed it. “This is an honour, since you must be calling on me. Why not invite me down-Cramer!”
He had headed for the office. My calling him “Cramer” instead of “Inspector” was so unexpected that he stopped and about-faced. “Why,” I demanded, “don’t you ever learn? You know damn well he hates to have anyone march in on him, even you, or especially you, and you only make it harder. Isn’t it me you want?”
“Yes, but I want him to hear it.”
“That’s obvious, or you would have sent for me instead of coming. If you will kindly-”
Wolfe’s bellow came out to us. “Confound it, come in here!”
Cramer wheeled and went, and I followed. Wolfe’s only greeting was a scowl. “I cannot,” he said coldly, “read my mail in an uproar.”
Cramer took his usual seat, the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk. “I came,” he said, “to see Goodwin, but I-”
“I heard you in the hall. You would enlighten me? That’s why you want me present?”
Cramer took a breath. “The day I try to enlighten you they can send me to the loony house. It’s just that I know Goodwin is your man and I want you to understand the situation. I thought the best way would be to discuss it with him with you present. Is that sensible?”
“It may be. I’ll know when I hear the discussion.”
Cramer aimed his sharp grey eyes at me. “I don’t intend to go all over it again, Goodwin. I’ve questioned you twice myself, and I’ve read your statement. I’m only after one point, the big point. To begin with, I’ll tell you something that is not to be repeated. There is not a thing, not a word, in what any of the others have said that rules out suicide. Not a single damn thing. And there’s a lot that makes suicide plausible, even probable. I’m saying that if it wasn’t for you suicide would be a reasonable assumption, and it seems likely, I only say likely, that that would be the final verdict. You see what that means.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m the fly in the soup. I don’t like it any better than you do. Flies don’t like being swamped in soup, especially when it’s hot.”
He got a cigar from a pocket, rolled it in his palms, put it between his teeth, which were white and even, and removed it. “I’ll start at the beginning,” he said. “Your being there when it happened. I know what you say, and it’s in your statement-the phone call from Austin Byne and the one from Mrs Robilotti. Of course that happened. When you say anything that can be checked it will always check. But did you or Wolfe help it to happen? Knowing Wolfe, and knowing you, I have got to consider the possibility that you wanted to be there, or Wolfe wanted you to, and you made arrangements. Did you?”
I was yawning and had to finish it. “I beg your pardon. I could just say no, but let’s cover it. How and why I was there is fully explained in my statement. Nothing related to it was omitted. Mr Wolfe thought I shouldn’t go because I would demean myself.”
“None of the people who were there was or is Wolfe’s client?”
“Mrs Robilotti was a couple of years ago. The job was finished in nine days. Except for that, no.”
His eyes went to Wolfe. “You confirm that?”
“Yes. This is gratuitous, Mr Cramer.”
“With you and Goodwin it’s hard to tell what is and what isn’t.” He came back to me. “I’m going to tell you how it stands up to now. First, it was cyanide. That’s settled.
Second, it was in the champagne. It was in what spilled on the floor when she dropped the glass, and anyway it acts so fast it must have been. Third, a two-ounce plastic bottle in her bag was half full of lumps of sodium cyanide. The laboratory calls them amorphous fragments; I call them lumps. Fourth, she had shown that bottle to various people and told them she wanted to kill herself; she had been doing that for more than a year.”
He shifted in the chair. He always sat so as to have Wolfe head on, but now he was at me. “Since the bag was on a chair fifteen feet away from her, and the bottle was in it, she couldn’t have taken a lump from it when Grantham brought her the champagne, or just before, but she could have taken it any time during the preceding hour or so and had it concealed in her handkerchief. Testing the handkerchief for traces is out because she dropped it and it fell in the spilled champagne-or rather, it’s not out but it’s no help. So that’s the set-up for suicide. Do you see holes in it?”
I killed a yawn. “Certainly not. It’s perfect. I don’t say she mightn’t have committed suicide, I only say she didn’t. As you know, I have good eyes, and she was only twenty feet from me. When she took the champagne from Grantham with her right hand her left hand was on her lap, and she didn’t lift it. She took the glass by the stem, and when Grantham raised his glass and said something she raised hers a little higher than her mouth and then lowered it and drank. Are you by any chance hiding an ace? Does Grantham say that when he handed her the glass she dropped something in it before she took hold of it?”
“No. He only says she might have put something in it before she drank; he doesn’t know.”
“Well, I do. She didn’t.”
“Yeah. You signed your statement.” He pointed the cigar at me.
“Look, Goodwin. You admit there are no holes in the set-up for suicide; how about the set-up for murder? The bag was there on the chair in full view. Did someone walk over and pick it up and open it and take out the bottle and unscrew the cap and shake out a lump and screw the cap back on and put the bottle back in the bag and drop it on the chair and walk away? That must have taken nerve.”