by Fer-De-Lance
“She’s busy.”
“Sure. But this is important; my boss would like to see her. It would only take an hour or so, here, a couple of dollars—”
“No! For the love of God can’t you let us alone in our house? Can’t you let the poor woman bury her brother without cackling in her ears to drive her crazy? Who are you that—”
Of course she would have to pick me to blow up on. I saw it was hopeless to get any co-operation out of her, she wouldn’t even listen to me, so I removed myself and went back to the front hall. The door to the dining-room was open, but the room was empty. After I had slipped in there I heard footsteps in the hall, and looking through the crack between the door and the jamb I saw Mrs. Ricci start upstairs. She went on up, and I could hear her continue the second flight. I stuck behind the door and waited, and luck came my way. Not more than ten minutes had passed before there were steps on the stairs, and using the crack again I saw Anna. I called her name, softly. She stopped and looked around. I called still softly, “In the dining-room.” She came to the threshold and I moved around where she could see me.
“Hello, Anna. Mrs. Ricci told me to wait here till you came down.”
“Oh. Mr. Archie.”
“Sure. I came to take you for a ride. Mrs. Ricci was angry that I came for you, but you remember on Wednesday I gave her a dollar? Today I gave her two dollars, so she said all right. But hurry up; I told her we’d be back before noon.”
I grabbed Anna’s hand, but she held back. “In that car like the other day?”
“Sure. Come on.”
“My jacket is upstairs and look at my dress.”
“It’s too warm for a jacket. Hurry; what if Mrs. Ricci changed her mind? We can buy you one—come on.”
With my hand on her arm I worked her out of the dining-room and down the short hall to the entrance door, but I didn’t want to look anxious outside; there was no telling how important that cop might think he was and any interruption might queer it. So I threw the door open and said, “Go on and get in, I’ll tell Mrs. Ricci good-bye.” I waited only a few seconds before I followed her; she was at the roadster opening the door. I went around to my side and climbed in, stepped on the starter, waved to the flatfoot and shot off down Sullivan Street in second with the engine roaring so that no yelling from an upstairs window could hurt Anna’s ears.
She certainly was a scarecrow. Her dress was a sight. But I wasn’t ashamed to have her beside me as, headed uptown again, I circled through Washington Square and rolled into Fifth Avenue. Not a bit. The clock on the dash said twenty after ten.
Anna said, “Where are we going, Mr. Archie?”
I said, “You see how it is about your dress in this low seat? Nobody can see you anyway except your face and there’s nothing wrong with that. What do you say we drive around Central Park? It’s a beautiful morning.”
“Oh yes.”
I didn’t say anything and she didn’t either for about ten blocks and then she said again, “Oh yes.”
She was certainly having a swell time. I went on up the Avenue and into the Park at Sixtieth. Up the west side to a Hundred and Tenth, across to Riverside Drive, up to Grant’s Tomb where I circled around and turned downtown. I don’t think she glanced at the trees or the grass or the river once; she kept looking at people in other cars. It was five minutes to eleven when I drew up in front of Wolfe’s house.
Mrs. Ricci had already telephoned twice. Fritz had a funny look when he told me about it. I settled that at once by calling her up and giving her a piece about obstructing justice. I didn’t know how much of it she heard with her yelling, but it seemed to work; we didn’t hear another peep out of her before noon, when I left to take Anna home.
Wolfe came in while I was phoning Mrs. Ricci. I watched him stopping to tell the girl good morning on his way to the desk. He was elegant with women. He had some sort of a perverted idea about them that I’ve never caught the hang of but every time I had ever seen him with one he was elegant. I couldn’t describe how he did it because I couldn’t make it out myself; it was hard to see how that enormous lump of flesh and folds could ever be called elegant, but he certainly was. Even when he was bullying one of them, like the time he sweated the Diplomacy Club business out of Nyura Pronn. That was the best exhibition of squeezing a sponge dry I’ve ever seen.
He started softly with Anna Fiore. After he had flipped through the mail, he turned and looked at her a minute before he said, “We no longer need to indulge in any conjectures as to the whereabouts of your friend Carlo Maffei. Accept my condolences. You have viewed the body?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It is a pity, a real pity, for he did not seek violence; he got in its path by misadventure. It is curious on how slender a thread the destiny of a man may hang; for example, that of the murderer of Carlo Maffei may hang on this, Miss Fiore: when and under what circumstances did you see a golf club in Maffei’s room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes. It will be easy to tell us now. Probably my question the other day recalled the occasion to your mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It did?”
She opened her mouth but said nothing. I was watching her, and she looked odd to me. Wolfe asked her again, “It did?”
She was silent. I couldn’t see that she was a bit nervous or frightened, she was just silent.
“When I asked you about this the other day, Miss Fiore, you seemed a little upset. I was sorry for that. Would you tell me why you were upset?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it perhaps your memory of something unpleasant that happened the day you saw the golf club?”
Silence again. I saw that something was wrong. Wolfe hadn’t asked the last question as if it meant anything. I knew the shades of the tones of his voice, and I knew he wasn’t interested; at least, not in that question. Something had him off on another trail. All at once he shot another question at her in another tone.
“When did you decide to say Yes, sir, to anything I might ask you?”
No answer; but without waiting Wolfe went on: “Miss Fiore, I would like to make you understand this. My last question had nothing whatsoever to do with a golf club or with Carlo Maffei. Don’t you see that? So if you have decided to reply nothing but Yes, sir, to anything I may ask about Carlo Maffei that will be all right. You have an absolute right to do that because that is what you decided to do. But if I ask you about other things you have no right to say Yes, sir, then, because that is not what you decided to do. About other things you should talk just as anyone would. So, when you decided to say nothing but Yes, sir, to me, was it on account of anything that Carlo Maffei had done?”
Anna was looking hard at him, right at his eye. It was clear that she wasn’t suspecting him or fighting against him, she was merely trying to understand him. She looked and he looked back. After a minute of that she said:
“No, sir.”
“Ah! Good. It was not on account of anything he had done. Then it had nothing to do with him, so it is all right for you to tell me anything about it that I may ask. You see that of course. If you have decided to tell me nothing of Carlo Maffei I won’t ask you. But this other business. Did you decide to say Yes, sir, to Mr. O’Grady, the man that came and asked you questions yesterday morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did you do that?”
She frowned, but said, “Because something happened.”
“Good. What happened?”
She shook her head.
“Come, Miss Fiore.” Wolfe was quiet. “There is no reason on earth why you shouldn’t tell me.”
She turned her head to look at me, and then back at him again. After a moment she said, “I’ll tell Mr. Archie.”
“Good. Tell Mr. Archie.”
She spoke to me. “I got a letter.”
Wolfe shot a glance at me and I took it up. “You got a letter yesterday?”
She nodded. “Yesterday morning.”
&nb
sp; “Who was it from?”
“I don’t know. There was no name, it was on a typewriter, and on the envelope it said only Anna and the address, not the rest of my name. Mrs. Ricci gets the mail from the box and she brought it to me but I didn’t want to open it where she was because I never get a letter. I went downstairs where I sleep and opened it.”
“What did it say?”
She looked at me a moment without replying, and then suddenly she smiled, a funny smile that made me feel queer so that it wasn’t easy to look at her. But I kept my eyes on hers. Then she said, “I’ll show you what was in it, Mr. Archie,” and reached down and pulled her skirt up above her knee, shoved her hand down inside of her stocking, and brought it out again with something in it. I stared as she unrolled five twenty-dollar bills and spread them out for me to see.
“You mean that was in the letter?”
She nodded. “One hundred dollars.”
“So I see. But there was something typewritten.”
“Yes. It said that if I would never tell anyone anything about Mr. Maffei or anything he ever did I could keep the money. But if I would not do that, if I told about him, I would have to burn it. I burned the letter, but I will not burn the money. I will keep it.”
“You burned the letter?”
“Yes.”
“And the envelope?”
“Yes.”
“And you think you won’t tell anyone about Mr. Maffei or about that golf club?”
“I never will.”
I looked at her. Wolfe’s chin was on his chest, but he was looking at her too. I got up from my chair. “Well, of all the damn fairy stories—”
“Archie! Apologize.”
“But good heavens—”
“Apologize.”
I turned to the girl. “I apologize, but when I think of all the gas I burned up riding you around the park—” I sat down.
Wolfe said, “Miss Fiore, did you happen to notice the postmark? The little round thing on the envelope that tells where it was mailed?”
“No, sir.”
“Of course not. By the way, that money did not belong to the man who sent it to you. He took it from Carlo Maffei’s pocket.”
“I will keep it, sir.”
“No doubt you will. You may not be aware that if the police knew of this they would take it from you ruthlessly. But do not be alarmed; your confidence in Mr. Archie is not misplaced.” He turned to me. “Grace and charm are always admirable qualities and sometimes useful. Take Miss Fiore home.”
I protested. “But why not—”
“No. Get her to burn those bills by replacing them from your expense book? No. She would not do it; but even if she would, I would not see money burned to save beauty herself from any grave that might be dug for her. The destruction of money is the only authentic sacrilege left us to abhor. Possibly you don’t realize what that hundred dollars means to Miss Fiore; to her it represents the unimaginable reward for a desperate and heroic act. Now that she has it safely back in its crypt, take her home.” He started to get himself out of his chair. “Good day, Miss Fiore. I have paid you a rare compliment; I have assumed that you mean what you say. Good morning.”
I was at the door telling her to come on.
Going back downtown I let her alone. I was pretty sore, after kidnapping her and driving her around in style for nearly an hour to have her go moron on us, but there was no use wasting breath on her. At Sullivan Street I just dumped her out on the sidewalk with a good deal of satisfaction, thinking that Wolfe had been elegant enough for both of us.
She stood there. As I pulled the gear shift lever to go on she said, “Thank you, Mr. Archie.”
She was being elegant! She had caught it from Wolfe. I said, “You’re not welcome, Anna, but goodbye and no hard feelings,” and rolled off.
Chapter 6
It was during the half-hour that I was gone taking Anna Fiore home that Wolfe had a relapse. It was a bad one, and it lasted three days. When I got back to Thirty-fifth Street he was sitting in the kitchen, by the little table where I always ate breakfast, drinking beer with three bottles already gone, arguing with Fritz whether chives should be used in tomato tarts. I stood and listened a few minutes without saying anything, then I went upstairs to my room and got a bottle of rye from the closet and took a drink.
I had never really understood Wolfe’s relapses. Sometimes it seemed plain that it was just ordinary discouragement and funk, like the time the taxi driver ran out on us in the Pine Street case, but other times there was no accounting for it at all. Everything would be sailing along and it would look to me as if we were about ready to wrap up the package and deliver it C.O.D., when for no reason at all he would lose interest. He was out and that was all there was to it. Nothing that I could say made the slightest dent on him. It might last anywhere from one afternoon up to a couple of weeks, or it was even possible that he was out for good and wouldn’t come back until something new turned up. While it lasted he acted one of two different ways: either he went to bed and stayed there, living on bread and onion soup, refusing to see anyone but me and forbidding me to mention anything I had on my mind; or he sat in the kitchen telling Fritz how to cook things and then eating them on my little table. He ate a whole half a sheep that way in two days once, different parts of it cooked in twenty different ways. At such times I usually had my tongue out from running all over town from the Battery to Bronx Park, trying to find some herb or root or maybe cordial that they needed in the dish they were going to do next. The only time I ever quit Wolfe was when he sent me to a Brooklyn dock where a tramp steamer from China was tied up, to try to buy some badden-root from the captain. The captain must have had a cargo of opium or something to make him suspicious; anyway he took it for granted that I was looking for trouble and filled my order by having half a dozen skinny savages wrap things around my skull I quit the next afternoon, phoning from the hospital, but a day later Wolfe came and took me home, and I was so astonished that he actually came himself that I forgot I had quit. That finished that relapse, too.
This day I knew it was a relapse as soon as I saw him sitting in the kitchen arguing with Fritz, and I was so disgusted that after I had gone upstairs and had a couple of drinks I came down again and went out. I started walking, but after a few blocks the appetite from the drinks was quite active and I stopped at a restaurant for a meal. No restaurant meal was much after seven years of Fritz’s everyday cooking, but I wouldn’t go home to eat; in the first place I was disgusted and in the second place those relapse menus couldn’t be depended on—sometimes it was a feast for an epicure, sometimes it was a dainty little taste good for eighty cents in Schrafft’s and sometimes it was just a mess.
But after the meal I felt better, and I walked back to Thirty-fifth Street and told Wolfe what Anderson had said that morning and added that it looked to me as if there would be something doing before the full moon came.
Wolfe was still sitting at the little table, watching Fritz stir something in a pan. He looked at me as if he was trying to remember where he had seen me before. He said, “Don’t ever mention that shyster’s name to me again.”
I said, hoping to get him sore, “This morning I phoned Harry Foster at the Gazette and told him what was up. I knew you’d want plenty of publicity.”
He didn’t hear me. He said to Fritz, “Have boiling water ready in case it should disunite.”
I went upstairs to tell Horstmann he’d have to nurse his babies alone that afternoon and maybe for a week. He would be miserable. It was always funny how he pretended to be annoyed when Wolfe was around but if anything happened to keep Wolfe from showing up on the dot at nine or four he was so worried and anxious you might have thought mealy bugs were after him. So I went upstairs to make him miserable.
That was two o’clock Friday afternoon, and the first sane look I got from Wolfe was eleven Monday morning, sixty-nine hours later.
In between things happened a little. First was the telephone call fr
om Harry Foster Friday around four. I’d been expecting it. He said they had dug Barstow up and done the autopsy but wouldn’t make any announcement. It wasn’t his story any more; others had got wind of it and were hanging around the coroner’s office.
A little after six the second phone call came. This time it was Anderson. I grinned when I heard his voice and glanced at my wrist; I could see him fuming around waiting for six o’clock. He said he wanted to talk to Wolfe.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wolfe is busy. This is Goodwin.”
He said he wanted Wolfe to come to White Plains. I laughed at him. He rang off. I didn’t like it, he struck me as a bad guy. After thinking it over a little I called up Henry H. Barber at his apartment and got all the dope on things like accessories and arrests of material witnesses. Then I went to the kitchen and told Wolfe about the two phone calls. He wiggled a spoon at me.
“Archie. This Anderson is a disease. Cleanse the telephone. Did I forbid mention of his name?”
I said, “I’m sorry, I should have known better. You know what I think, sir. A nut is always a nut even when it’s you. I want to talk to Fritz.”
Wolfe wasn’t listening. I told Fritz that for dinner I would come and get sandwiches and take them to the office, and then I told him that when the buzzer rang, until further notice, he was not to go to the door, I would attend to it. Under no circumstances was he to open the door.
I knew it was probably uncalled-for precaution, but I was taking no chances on anyone busting in there with Wolfe in one of his Bloomingdale moods. I was glad he hadn’t tried to send me for anything and I hoped he wouldn’t, for I wouldn’t have gone. If it was a washout, all right, but I wasn’t going to let them make ninnies of us if I could help it. Nothing happened that night. The next morning I stayed out of Wolfe’s way, mostly in the front room, opening the door to a gas man and an expressman, and once to a slick youth that wanted to get helped through college. I helped him as far as the bottom of the stoop. It was around eleven when I obeyed the buzzer by opening the door again and found a big husky standing against it, coming in with it, his foot sliding along. I gave him a good solid stiff-arm and pushed him back, and went on out, shutting the door behind me.