by Rex Stout
Of course the boob had telegraphed the punch. If he hadn't, if he had fired that at me to begin with, he might have been gratified at a couple of stammers and a little hemming and hawing, but as it was he allowed me plenty of time for preparation.
I grinned at him. "Sure I'll explain. Last evening at Os- good's house I found a wallet on the veranda. I looked in it for papers to identify the owner, and found it was Bronson's, and returned it to him. It never occurred to me to wipe off my prints."
"Oh. You had it ready."
"Had what ready?" I demanded innocently. "The wallet?" "The explanation."
"Yeah, I carry a big stock for the country trade." I com- pressed my lips at him. "For God's sake use your bean. If I had croaked the guy and frisked the wallet, or if I had found him dead and frisked it, would I have left my. signature all over it? Do I strike you as being in that category? Maybe I can offer you a detail though. You say the wallet was empty. Last night when I found it, and when I returned it to him, it was bulging with a wad which I estimated roughly at 2000 bucks."
At that point Nero Wolfe's genius went into action. I say genius not because he concocted the stratagem, for that was only quick wit, but because he anticipated the need for it far enough ahead of time to get prepared. I didn't rec- ognize it at the moment for what it was; all I saw, without paying it any attention, was that, apparently bored by a con- versation he had no part in, he slipped the pistol into his coat pocket and picked up the sprayer and began fussing with the nozzle and the pressure handle.
"You advise me to use my bean," Barrow was saying. "I'll try. Did you remove anything from the wallet?" "Today? I haven't seen it. I only found it once." "Today or any other time. Did you?" "No."
"Did you take anything from Bronson at all? His person or his effects?" "No."
"Are you willing to submit to a search?" My brain didn't exactly reel, but the wires buzzed. For half a second five or six alternatives chased each other around in a battle royal. Meanwhile I was treating Barrow to a grin to show how serene I was, and also, out of the corner of an eye, I was perceiving that Nero Wolfe's right index finger, resting half concealed by his coat on the pressure lever, was being wiggled at me. It was a busy moment. Hoping to God I had interpreted the wiggle correctly, I told Barrow affably, "Excuse the hesitation, but I'm trying to decide which would annoy you more, to deny you the courtesy and compel you to take steps, or let you go ahead and find nothing. Now that my gun is gone and you can't disarm me-"
The spray of nicotine and soap, full force under high pres- sure, hit him smack in the face.
He spluttered and squeaked and jumped aside, blinded. That was another busy moment. My hand shot into my breast pocket and out again and without stopping for reflection slipped my ostrich card case into the side coat pocket of District Attorney Waddell, who had stepped toward the cap- tain with an ejaculation. Except for that I didn't move. Barrow grabbed for his handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes. There were murmurings from onlookers. Wolfe, offering his own handkerchief, said gravely:
"A thousand apologies. Captain. My stupid carelessness. It won't hurt you, of course, but nevertheless-"
"Shut it or I'll shut it for you." There were still pearly drops on Barrow's chin and ears, but he had his eyes wiped. He faced me and demanded savagely, "A goddam slick trick, huh? Where did you ditch it?"
"Ditch what? You're crazy."
"You're damn right I'm crazy." He whirled to Waddell:
"What did he do when that fat slob sprayed my eyes shut?"
"Nothing," said Waddell. "He didn't do anything. He stood right here by me. He didn't move."
"I can add my assurance," Wolfe put in. "If he had moved I would have seen him."
Waddell glared at him savagely. "You're so slick you slide, huh?"
"I have apologized, sir."
"To hell with you. How'd you like to go along to the courthouse with us?"
Wolfe shook his head. "You're in a huff, Captain. I don't blame you, but I doubt if it's actionable. To arrest me for accidentally spraying you with soap would seem… well, impulsive-"
Barrow turned his back on him to confront Waddell. "You say he didn't move?"
"Goodwin? No."
"He didn't hand Wolfe anything?"
"Positively not. He wasn't within 10 feet of him."
"He didn't throw anything?"
"No."
A dozen or so onlookers had collected, down the aisle in either direction. Barrow raised his voice at them: "Did any of you see this man take anything from his pocket and hand it to the fat man or put it somewhere or throw it? Don't be afraid to speak up. I'm Captain Barrow and it's important."
There were head shakings and a few muttered negatives. A woman with a double chin said in a loud voice, "I was watching you, that spray in your face, it was like a scene in the movies, but if he'd done any throwing or anything like that I'm sure I'd have seen him because my eye takes in everything."
There were a couple of nervous giggles and Barrow aban- doned his amateurs. He looked around, and I felt sorry for him. I still hadn't moved. There was no place within perhaps 6 feet where I could possibly have hidden anything. In the direction I faced were pots of orchid plants on the benches; behind me was the table of dahlia blooms in vases; both were way beyond my reach. I stood with my arms folded.
Barrow had pretty well regained his handsome and un- flinching dignity. He composedly wiped with his handkerchief behind his ears and under his chin and told me: 'Tm taking you to the courthouse for questioning in connection with the murder of Howard Bronson. If you're still trying to decide how to annoy me, it'll take me maybe twenty minutes to get a legal commitment as a material witness-"
"Permit me," Wolfe put in, purring. "We surely owe you some complaisance,.Captain, after this regrettable ac- cident. I don't believe I'd insist on a warrant, Archie. We really should cooperate."
"Whatever you say, boss."
"Go. After all, it is a little public here for a privy inter- view. I may join you later.-In the meantime, Mr. Waddell, if you can spare a few minutes, I'd like to tell you of a dis- covery I made last evening, touching both Clyde Osgood and Mr. Bronson. I questioned Bronson for nearly an hour, and I think you'll find it interesting."
"Well… I was going with Captain Barrow…"
Wolfe shrugged. "Now that Bronson has also been mur- dered, it is doubly interesting."
"What about it, Captain?"
"Suit yourself," Barrow told him. "You're the district attorney, you're in charge. I can handle Goodwin." He sounded as if all he required was a red-hot poker and a couple of thumbscrews. "Shall I go on?"
Waddell nodded. "I'll be along pretty soon."
I told Wolfe, "When the young lady comes for the orchids, tell her I've gone to pick huckleberries."
Walking the length of the main exhibits building to the exit, and through the crowds beyond the end of the grand- stand, Barrow kept behind, with his left elbow about 10 inches back of my right one, proving that he had been to police school. A patrol car, with the top down and a trooper behind the wheel, was waiting there. I was instructed to get in with the driver and Barrow climbed in behind. His eyes weren't leaving me for a second, and I reflected that his hunch that I had something I would like to discard had probably been reinforced by Wolfe's performance with the sprayer.
In 5 minutes, in spite of the exposition traffic, we were pulling up at the courthouse. Instead of entering at the front, as with Osgood when calling on Waddell the day before, we went around to a side entrance that was on the ground level. The hall was dark and smelled of disinfectant and stale tobacco juice. The trooper preceding us turned the knob of a door marked SHERI F, with one F gone, and I followed him in with Barrow at my rear. It was a big dingy room with de- crepit desks and chairs, at one desk in a corner being the only occupant, a bald-headed gentleman with a red face and gold- rimmed specs who nodded at us and said nothing.
"We're going through you," Barrow announced.
I nodde
d indifferently and struck a pose. I know that the whole included all its parts and that that was one of the parts, and it had been necessary for Wolfe to toss me to the dogs so that he could have a private interview with the dis- trict attorney's coat pocket. So I tolerated it, and got ad- ditional proof that they had been to police school. They did everything but rip my seams. When they had finished I re- turned the various items to their proper places, and sat down. Barrow stood and gazed down at me. I was surprised he didn't go and wash his face, because that nicotine and soap must have stung. Tough as they come, those weatherbeaten babies.
"The mistake you made," I told him, "was coming in there breathing fire. Nero Wolfe and I are respectable law-abiding detectives."
He grunted. "Forget it. I'd give a month's pay to know how you did it, and maybe I'll find out sometime, but not now. I'm not going to try any hammering. Not at present." He glanced to see that the trooper was ready at a desk with notebook and pencil. "I just want to know a few things. Do you maintain that you took nothing from Bronson at any time?"
"I do."
"Did you suspect him of being implicated in the murder of Clyde Osgood?"
"You've got the wrong party. Mr. Wolfe does all the sus- pecting for the firm, ask him. I'm the office boy."
"Do you refuse to answer?"
"No indeed. If you want to know whether I personally suspected Bronson of murder, the reply is no. No known motive."
"Wasn't there anything in his relations with Clyde that might have supplied a motive?"
"Search me. You're wasting time. Day before yesterday at 2 o'clock the Osgoods and Pratts and Bronson were all com- plete strangers to Mr. Wolfe and me. Our only interest in any of them is that Osgood hired us to investigate the murder of his son. You started investigating simultaneously. If you're discouraged with what you've collected and want our crop as a handout, you'll have to go to Mr. Wolfe. You said you wanted to question me in connection with the murder of Howard Bronson."
'That's what I'm doing."
"Go ahead."
He kicked a chair around and sat down. "Wolfe inter- viewed Bronson last night. What was said at that interview?"
"Ask Mr. Wolfe."
"Do you refuse to answer?"
"I do, you know. I'm a workingman and don't want to lose my job."
"Neither do I. I'm working on a murder, Goodwin."
"So am I."
"Were you working on it when you entered the shed this afternoon where Bronson was killed?"
"No, not at that moment. I was waiting for Lew Bennett to tear himself away from the judging lot. I happened to see Nancy Osgood going into the shed and followed her out of curiosity. I found her in there in the stall talking to Jimmy Pratt. I knew her old man would be sore if he heard of it, which would have been too bad under the circumstances, so I advised them to postpone it and scatter, and they did so, and I went back to the Methodist tent where my employer was."
"How did they and you happen to pick the spot where Bronson's body was?"
"I didn't pick it, I found them there. I don't know why they picked it, but it would seem likely that it wasn't cause and effect. I imagine they would have chosen some other spot if they had known what was under the pile of straw."
"Did you know what was under it?"
"I'll give you three guesses."
"Did you?"
"No."
"Why were you so eager to get them out of there in a hurry?"
"I wouldn't say I was eager. It struck me they were fairly dumb to feed gossip at this particular time."
"You wouldn't say that you were eager to keep it quiet that they had been there, and you had?"
"Eager? Nope. Put it that I was inclined to feel it was desirable."
"Then why did you bribe the shed attendant?"
Of course he had telegraphed it again. But even so it was an awkward and undesirable question.
I was waiting for that," I told him. "Now you have got me where it hurts, because the only explanation I can offer, which is the true one, is loony. There are times when I feel kittenish, and that was one. I'll give it to you verbatim." I did so, words and music, repeating the conversation just as it had occurred, up to the departure of the beneficiary. "There," I said, "Robin Hood, his sign. And when a corpse was dis- covered there, the louse thought I had been bribing him with a measly tenspot, and so did you. I swear to God I'll lay for him tonight and take it away from him."
Barrow grunted. "You're good at explanations. The finger- prints on the wallet. I suppose a man like Bronson would leave a wallet containing two thousand dollars lying around on a veranda. Now this. Do you realize how good you are?"
"I told you it was loony. But lacking evidence to the con- trary, you might assume that I'm sane. Do I look like a goof who would try to gag a stranger in a case of murder with a ten dollar note? Should I start serious bribing around here, the per capita income of this county would shoot up like a skyrocket. And by the way, does that clodhopper say that I made any suggestions about silence or even discretion?"
"We're all clodhoppers around here. You try telling a jury of clophoppers that you're in the habit of tossing out ten dollar bills for the comic effect."
I snorted. "Unveil it, brother. What jury? My peers sitting on my life? Honest, are you as batty as that?"
"No." The Captain squinted at me and rubbed a spot on the side of his neck. "No, Goodwin, I'm not. I'm not looking forward to the pleasure of hearing a jury's opinion of you. Nor do I bear any grudge because you and your boss started the stink on the Osgood thing. I don't care how slick you are or where you come from or how much you soak Osgood for, but now that the bag has been opened it is going to be emptied. Right to the bottom. Do you understand that?"
"Go ahead and jiggle it."
Tm going to. And nothing's going to roll out of my sight while I'm not looking. You say ask Wolfe, and I'm going to, but right now I'm asking you. Are you going to talk or not?"
"My God, my throat's sore now."
"Yeah. I've got the wallet with your prints all over it. I've got the bill you gave the shed attendant. Are you going to tell me what you got from Bronson and where it is?"
"You're just encouraging me to lie. Captain."
"All right, I'll encourage you some more. This morning a sheriffs deputy was in the hotel lobby when Bronson entered. When Bronson went to a phone booth and put in a New York call, the deputy got himself plugged in on another line. He heard Bronson tell somebody in New York that a man named Goodwin had poked him in the jaw and taken the receipt from him, but that he expected to pull it off anyway. Well?"
"Gee," I said, "that's swell. All you have to do is have the New York cops grab the somebody and run him through the coffee grinder-"
"Much obliged. What was the receipt for and where is it?"
I shook my head. "The deputy must have heard wrong. Maybe the name was Doodwin or Goldstein or DiMaggio-"
"I would like to clip you. Jesus, I would enjoy stretching you out." Barrow breathed. "Are you going to spill it?"
"Sorry, nothing to spill."
"On the hotel register you wrote your first name as Archie. Is that correct?"
"Yep."
He turned to his colleague. "Bill, youll find Judge Hutehins waiting upstairs. Run up and swear out a material witness commitment. Archie Goodwin. Hurry down with it, we've got to shake a leg."
I raised the brows. The cossack made it snappy. I asked, "How's the accommodations?"
"Fair. A little crowded on account of the exposition. Any time you're ready to talk turkey-"
"No speak English. This will get you a row of ciphers and the finger of scorn and a bellyache."
He merely looked unflinching. We sat. In a few minutes his pal returned with a document, and I asked to see it and was obliged. Barrow took it and asked me to come on, and I went between them down the dark hall, around a comer and along another hall, and into another office smaller than the one we had left but not so dingy, with WARDEN on the door. A s
leepy-looking plump guy sat at a desk which had a vase of flowers on it besides miscellany. He let out a low growl when he saw us, like a dog being disturbed in the mid- dle of comfort. Barrow handed him the paper and told him:
"Material witness in the Bronson case. We've gone through him; I suppose you'll want to take his jackknife. I'll stop in bter for my copy or get it in the morning. Any time he asks for me, day or night, I want to see him."
The warden pushed a button on his desk, ran his eyes over the paper, looked at me, and cackled. "By golly, bud, you should have put on some old clothes. The valley service here is terrible."
17
IT WAS certainly an antique. Apparently it was a whole wing of the ground floor of the court- house. The cells faced each other, two rows of them, one on either side of a long corridor. Mine was two doors from the far end. My cellmate was a chap in a dark blue suit with a pointed nose and sharp brown eyes and a thick mop of well- brushed hair. At the time I was locked in, which was around 6 o'clock, he was sitting on one of the cots brushing the hair. The dim light from the little barred window, too high to see out of, made things seem gloomy. We exchanged greetings and he went on brushing. Pretty soon he asked;
"Got any cards or dice with you?"
"Nope."
"They didn't strip you, did they?"
'They took my knife."
He put the brush down and nodded. "You can't kick on that. Were you working out at the grounds? I've never seen you around before."
"You wouldn't. My name is Archie Goodwin, and I'm from New York and am being squeezed." I waved a hand and sat down on the other cot, which was covered with a dirty gray blanket. "Forget it. Were you working out at the grounds?"
"I was until yesterday afternoon. Spoon-bean. Are you hungry?"
'I could eat. But I hesitate to send in an order-"
"Oh, not on the house. No. They feed at 5, and it's the usual. But if you're hungry and happen to have a little jack…"
"Go ahead."
He went over to the deor and tapped three times with his fingernail on one of the iron bars, waited a second, and tapped twice. In a couple of minutes slow footsteps sounded in the corridor, and as they got to our apartment my mate said in a tone restrained but not particularly secretive, "Here, Slim."