by Rex Stout
“She herself had no such suspicion?”
“Not in evidence. You realize what she was like.” Cramer shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What Brady says about the tetanus, one three-hundredth of a grain of the toxin is fatal. The bacilli and spores are more or less around everywhere, but of course especially in the neighborhood of horses. The soil around a barnyard reeks with it. I asked Brady what about his infecting the cut or the bandage with his own fingers when he dressed it, since he had just been riding, but he said he had washed his hands, and so had the Nichols girl, and she corroborated it. He said it was highly unlikely that there should have been tetanus bacilli on the piece of glass or her slipper or the skin of her toe or that animal’s paw, at least enough of them to cause such a quick and virulent attack, but he said it was also unlikely that when a man walks across a street at a corner with a green light he should get run over, but sometimes he does. He says that he deeply regrets he didn’t return Tuesday evening or Wednesday and give her an injection of antitoxin, but he doesn’t blame himself because no doctor alive would have done so. After the poison reached the nerve centers, as it had when Brady arrived Friday night, it was too late for antitoxin, though he tried it. Everything Brady said has been checked with the Examiner and is okay.”
“I don’t like his analogy,” Wolfe declared. “A man crossing a street is extremely likely to get run over. That’s why I never undertake it. However, that doesn’t impeach Dr. Brady. I ask you again, Mr. Cramer, why do you bother me with all this, or yourself either?”
“That’s what I came here to find out.”
“Not the proper place. Try the inside of your head.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Cramer asserted. “I’m satisfied. It was accidental. But that damn brother won’t let go. And before I get through with him and toss him out on his ear. I thought I’d better have a word with you. If there was anyone around there with murder in his heart, you ought to know. You would know. Since you had just started on a job for her. You’re not interested in petty larceny. So I’d like to know what the job was.”
“No doubt,” Wolfe said. “Didn’t any of those people tell you?”
“No.”
“None of them?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know she had hired me?”
“The brother told me about Goodwin being there, and that led me to question him. But he doesn’t seem to know what your job was about.”
“Neither do I.”
Cramer took the cigar from his mouth and said vehemently, “Now look! How’s it going to hurt you? Loosen up for once! I want to cross this off, that’s all. I’ve got work to do! All I want to know-”
“Please!” Wolfe said curtly. “You say you are satisfied that the death was accidental. You have no shred of evidence of a crime. Miss Huddleston hired me for a confidential job. Her death does not release me, it merely deprives me of the job. If you had an action you could summon me, but you haven’t. Will you have some beer?”
“No.” Cramer glared. “My God, you can be honorable when you want to be! Will you answer a plain question? Do you think she was murdered?”
“No.”
“Then you think it was purely accidental?”
“No.”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Nothing at all. About that. I know nothing about it. I have no interest in it. The woman died, as all women do, may she rest in peace, and I lost a fee. Why don’t you ask me this: if you knew what I know, if I told you all about the job she hired me for, would you feel that her death required further investigation?”
“Okay. I ask it.”
“The answer is no. Since you have discovered no single suspicious circumstance. Will you have some beer?”
“Yes, I will,” Cramer growled.
He consumed a bottle, got no further concessions either in information or in hypothetical questions, and departed.
I saw him to the door, returned to the office and remarked:
“Old Frizzle-top seems to be improving with age. Of course he has had the advantage of studying my methods. He seems to have covered the ground up there nearly as well as I could.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe pushed the tray aside to make room for the map. “Not that I don’t agree with you. Nearly as well as you could, yes. But either he didn’t have sense enough to learn everything that happened that afternoon, or he missed his best chance to expose a crime, if there was one. It hasn’t rained the past week, has it? No.”
I cocked an eye at him. “You don’t say. How many guesses can I have?”
But he left it at that and got busy with the map, ignoring my questions. It was one of the many occasions when it would have been a pleasure to push him off of the Empire State Building, if there had been any way of enticing him there. Of course there was a chance that he was merely pulling my leg, but I doubted it. I know his tones of voice.
It ruined my night for me. Instead of going to sleep in thirty seconds it took me thirty minutes, trying to figure out what the devil he meant, and I woke up twice with nightmares, the first time because it was raining on me through the roof and each raindrop was a tetanus germ, and the second time I was lost in a desert where it hadn’t rained for a hundred years. Next morning, after Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms at nine o’clock, I got stubborn. I sat at my desk and went over that party at Riverdale in my mind, second by second, as I had reported it to Wolfe. And I got it. I would have hit it sooner if it hadn’t been for various interruptions, phone calls and so on, but anyway finally there it was, as obvious as lipstick.
Provided one thing. To settle that I phoned Doc Vollmer, whose home and office were in a house down the street, and learned that tetanus, which carried death, had a third as many lives as a cat-one as a toxin, one as a bacillus, and one as a spore. The bacillus or the spore got in you and manufactured the toxin, which did the dirty work, traveling not with the blood but with the nerves. The bacillus and spore were both anaerobic, but could live in surface soil or dust for years and usually did, especially the spore.
And now what? Just forget it? Wolfe had, but then he wasn’t human, whereas I was and am. Besides, it would be very neat if it got results, and it would teach Wolfe a lesson. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and I wanted to get out before he came downstairs, so I phoned up to him that I was leaving on an errand, and walked to the garage on Tenth Avenue and got the roadster. Heading uptown, I stopped at a hardware store near 42nd Street and went in and bought a long-bladed kitchen knife, a narrow garden trowel, and four paper bags. Then I went to a phone booth in a drug store at the corner and called the Huddleston number.
Maryella’s voice answered, and I asked to speak to Miss Nichols. In a minute she was on, and I told her I was thinking she might be leaving there soon and I’d like to have her address.
“It’s nice of you to call,” she said. “It’s a-pleasant surprise. Naturally I thought you-last week, I mean-I thought you were just being a detective.”
“Don’t kid me,” I told her. “Anyone that dances the way you do being surprised at a phone call. Not that I suppose you’re doing any dancing at present.”
“Not now. No.”
“Will you be leaving there soon?”
“Not this week. We’re trying to help Mr. Huddleston straighten things up.”
“Will you send me your address when you go?”
“Why-yes. Certainly. If you want it.”
“I do you know. How would it be if I drove up there? Just to say hello?”
“When? Now?”
“Right now. I can be there in twenty minutes. I’d kind of like to see you.”
“Why-” Silence. “That would be all right. If you want to take the trouble.”
I told her it would be no trouble at all, hung up, went out to the roadster, and made for the entrance to the West Side Highway at 46th Street.
I admit my timing was terrible. If I had arrived, say, between twelve thirty and one,
they might have been in the house having lunch, and I could have said I had already eaten and waited for Janet on the terrace, which would have been a perfect opportunity. Of course as it turned out that would have made a monkey of me, so it was just as well that I dubbed it. As it was, leaving the car outside the fence, with the knife in one hip pocket and the trowel in the other, and the folded paper bags in the side pocket of my coat, I walked across the lawn to where Larry stood near the pool, glowering at it. When he heard me coming he transferred the glower to me.
“Hello,” I said amiably. “What, no alligators?”
“No. They’re gone.”
“And Mister? And the bears?”
“Yes. What the hell are you doing here?”
I suppose it would have been sensible to appease him, but he was really quite irritating. Tone and look both. So I said, “I came to play tag with Mister,” and started for the house, but Janet appeared, cutting across the lawn. She looked prettier than I remembered her, or maybe not so much prettier as more interesting. Her hair was done differently or something. She said hello to me and let me have a hand to shake, and then told Larry:
“Maryella says you’ll have to help her with those Corliss bills. Some of them go back before she came, and she doesn’t seem to trust my memory.”
Larry nodded at her, and, moving, was in front of me. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“Nothing special,” I said. “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom-”
“If you’ve got a bill, mail it. You’ll get about three percent.”
I suppressed impulses and shook my head. “No bill. I came to see Miss Nichols.”
“Yes you did. You came to snoop-”
But Janet had her hand on his arm. “Please, Larry. Mr. Goodwin phoned and asked to see me. Please?”
I would have preferred smacking him, and it was irritating to see her with her hand on his arm looking up at him the way she did, but when he turned and marched off towards the house I restrained myself and let him go.
I asked Janet, “What’s eating him?”
“Well,” she said, “after all, you are a detective. And his aunt has died-terrible, it was terrible-”
“Sure. If you want to call that grief. What was the crack about three per cent?”
“Oh���” She hesitated. “But there’s nothing secret about it, goodness knows. Miss Huddleston’s affairs are tangled up. Everybody thought she was rich, but apparently she spent it as fast as she made it.”
“Faster, if the creditors are going to get three percent.” I got started towards the terrace, and she came beside me. “In that case, the brother and the nephew are out of luck. I apologize to Larry. He’s probably overcome by grief, after all.”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” Janet protested.
“Then I take it back.” I waved it away. “Let’s talk about something else.”
I was thinking the best plan was to sit with her on the terrace, with the idea of getting her to leave me alone there for a few minutes, which was all I needed, but the hot noon sun was coming straight down, and she went on into the house with me behind her. She invited me to sit on a couch with her, but with the tools in my hip pockets I thought it was safer to take a chair facing her. We had a conversation.
Of course the simplest thing would have been to tell her what I wanted to do and then go ahead and do it, and I deny that it was any suspicion of her, either as a letter writer or as a murderess, that kept me from doing that. It was the natural desire I had not to hurt her feelings by letting her know that my real purpose in coming was not just to see her. If things should develop it was good policy to have her friendly. So I played it for a solo. I was thinking it was about time to get on with it, and was figuring out an errand for her, preferably upstairs, that would be sure to keep her five minutes, when suddenly I saw something through the window that made me stare.
It was Daniel Huddleston on the terrace with a newspaper bundle under his arm and a long-bladed knife in one hand and a, garden trowel in the other!
I stood up to see better.
“What is it?” Janet asked, and stood up too. I shushed her and whispered in her ear, “First lesson for a detective. Don’t make any noise.”
Brother Daniel stopped near the center of the terrace, in front of the swing, knelt down on a flagstone, deposited the newspaper bundle and some folded newspapers beside him, and the trowel, and plunged the knife into the strip of turf at the edge of the flagstone. There was nothing furtive about it; he didn’t do any glancing over his shoulder, but he worked fast. With the trowel he scooped out a hunk of the turf, the width of the strip, about six inches long and three inches deep, and rolled it in a piece of newspaper. Then a second one, to the right of the first hole, and then a third one, to the left, wrapping each separately.
“What on earth does he think he’s doing?” Janet whispered. I squeezed her arm.
He was about done. Opening the package he had brought with him, he produced three strips of turf the size and shape of those he had just dug out, fitted them into the trench he had made, pressed them with his foot until they were level with the flagstone, remade the package with the three hunks he had removed, and the knife and trowel, and went off as if he were bound somewhere.
I took Janet’s hand and gave her an earnest eye. “Listen, girlie,” I said, “my one fault is curiosity. Otherwise I am perfect. Don’t forget that. It’s time for your lunch anyway.”
She said something to my back as I made for the door. I emerged onto the terrace cautiously, slid across and into the hedge of shrubbery, made a hole and looked through. Daniel was forty paces away, going across the lawn not in the direction of the drive where my car was but the other way, off to the right. I decided to give him another twenty paces before emerging, and it was well that I did, for suddenly a voice sounded above me:
“Hey, Uncle Dan! Where you going?”
Daniel stopped in his tracks and whirled. I twisted my neck, and through the leaves got a glimpse of Larry’s head sticking out of an upper window, and Maryella’s beside it.
Larry shouted, “We need you!”
“See you later!” Daniel yelled.
“But it’s time for lunch!” Maryella called.
“See you later!” Daniel turned and was off.
“Now that’s a performance,” Maryella said to Larry.
“Cuckoo,” Larry declared.
Their heads went in. But they might still have been looking out, so I scooted along the side of the house to the corner, and from there circled wide around evergreens and similar obstructions before swinging into the direction Daniel had taken. He wasn’t in sight. This part of the premises was new to me, and the first thing I knew I ran smack into the fence in the middle of a thicket. I couldn’t fight my way through on account of noise, so I doubled around, dashed along the edge of the thicket, and pretty soon hit a path. No sight of Daniel. The path took me to a series of stone steps up a steep bank, and up I went. Getting to the top, I saw him. A hundred feet ahead was a gate in the fence, and he was shutting the gate and starting down a lane between rows of little trees. The package was under his arm. In a way I was more interested in the package than I was in him. What if he threw it down a sewer? So I closed up more than I would have for an ordinary tailing job, and proceeding through the gate, followed him down the lane. At the end of the lane, not far ahead, he stopped, and I dived into the trees.
He had stopped at a curb, a paved street. The way cars were rolling by, apparently it was a main traffic street; and that point was settled when a double-decker bus jerked to a stop right square in front of Daniel, and he climbed on and-off the bus went.
I hotfooted it to the corner. It was Marble Avenue. Riverdale is like that. The bus was too far away to read its number, and no taxi was in sight in either direction. I stepped into the street, into the path of the first car coming, and held up a commanding palm. By bad luck it was occupied by the two women that Helen Hokinson used fo
r models, but there was no time to pick and choose. I hopped into the back seat, gave the driver a fleeting glimpse of my detective license, and said briskly:
“Police business. Step on it and catch up with a bus that’s ahead.”
The one driving emitted a baby scream. The other one said, “You don’t look like a policeman. You get out. If you don’t we’ll drive to a police station.”
“Suit yourself, madam. While we sit and talk the most dangerous gangster in New York is escaping. He’s on the bus.”
“Oh! He’ll shoot at us.”
“No. He isn’t armed.”
“Then why is he dangerous?”
“For God’s sake,” I reached for the door latch, “I’ll take a car with a man in it!”
But the car started forward. “You will not,” the driver said fiercely. “I’m as good a driver as any man. My husband says so.”
She was okay at that. Within a block she had it up to fifty, and she was good at passing, and it wasn’t long before we caught up with the bus. At least, a bus. When it stopped at a corner I told her to get alongside, which she did neatly, and with my hand over my face I looked for him and there he was.
“I’m shadowing him,” I told the ladies. “I think he’s on his way to meet a crooked politician. The first empty taxi we see you can let me out if you want to, but of course he might suspect a taxi, whereas he never would suspect a car like this with two good-looking well-dressed women in it.”
The driver looked grim. “In that case,” she declared, “it is our duty.”
And by gum she crawled along behind that bus for a good three-quarters of an hour, to Riverside Drive, the whole length of the Drive, over to Broadway, and on downtown. I thought the least I could do was furnish diversion, which I did with tales of my experiences with gangsters and kidnappers and so forth. When Daniel was still on the bus after crossing 42nd Street I decided in disgust that he was probably bound for Headquarters, and I was so deeply considering the feasibility of intercepting him before he got there that I nearly missed it when he hopped to the sidewalk at 34th Street. Paying the ladies with thanks and a cordial smile, I jumped out and dodged through the midday shopping mob, and almost lost him. I picked him up going west on 34th.