“I haven’t gotten to Maria, or anybody else at home,” I said, turning again to the phone. “I’ll try again now.”
“Later, after lunch,” he said, hauling his bulk out of the chair and making for the dining room.
I’m sure Fritz’s potato pancakes were superb, but for the second time in two days, my taste buds were on automatic pilot. When we were back in the office with coffee, I made another call to the Stevens-Radovich apartment. There was an answer this time, but not what I wanted. The maid said Maria wasn’t expected home until late that night, so I left a message for her to call me—whenever she got in. “We can try going directly to Stevens,” I suggested. “He’s probably over at Symphony Hall right now.”
Wolfe slowly set his book down, dog-earing a page. “No, Archie, our commitment is to Miss Radovich, not Mr. Stevens. Any communication with her uncle must be done through her, or with her approval.”
I swiveled around, ready to argue, but the book was open and in front of his face again. After five minutes of thinking dark thoughts, I got up noisily and went to the hall, grabbing my coat from the rack and slamming the front door behind me. A light rain had begun, blending with my mood. I pulled up my collar and headed east, cooling off as I went. I was being unfair to Wolfe, I argued with myself. After all, he had agreed to take the case, although on one condition. And it was obviously going to be up to me to fulfill that condition. I turned north on Eighth Avenue and ducked into a diner where I sometimes stop for coffee. This time I ordered milk from the counterman, who had only one other customer, an old guy about six stools down who was hunched over a bowl of chili.
I took a few sips of the milk and went to the pay phone to look up the number of Maria’s dance troupe, which had its studio on Forty-sixth Street in the theater district. I dialed and got a female voice, along with music in the background.
“Yes, Miss Radovich is here,” the voice said, “but she’s in the middle of a rehearsal right now. They should be taking a break in a few minutes.” I left my name and gave her the pay-phone number. I was on the third glass of milk, with a slice of peach pie thrown in, when the phone rang. “Mr. Goodwin?” Her voice was still breathless, although this time it could have been from the dancing.
After I assured her it was me despite the different phone number, the questions started tumbling out.
“Hold it,” I said. “Now catch your breath and listen while I fill you in. Mr. Wolfe says yes, he’ll take your money and try to solve the problem. But you’ve got to do something for us.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Miss Radovich, you’ve got to persuade your uncle to come to Mr. Wolfe’s house for a talk.”
Several seconds passed, and when she spoke, she sounded desperate. “You know he won’t do that—I couldn’t get him to.”
“Look, Miss Radovich, when you first called, I wouldn’t have given a Canadian dime for our chances of waking up Mr. Wolfe. I’m happy to say I was wrong. Now he’s awake, but he’s also stubborn, very stubborn. He wants to see Milan Stevens in his office. Now, if you don’t think you can pull it off, I’ll be glad to come over, and we can talk to him together.”
“No!” she replied in something between a whisper and a shout. “If you came, he would be horribly angry both with you and with me. I must get back to rehearsal now, and we practice again after dinner, so I won’t be home until late, almost midnight. But then I will ask Uncle Milos. I promise you.” I repeated that I’d be happy to be there for moral support, but that only rattled her more. I gave up and said I’d wait to hear.
The rain had stopped, and I needed exercise, so I walked. By the time I got home, it was a little after four, which put Wolfe in the plant rooms and meant I probably wouldn’t see him again that day: I was taking Lily to the Rangers game after an early supper at Rusterman’s.
If I ever decide to spend the rest of my life with one woman—a less-than-even bet—that woman will be Lily Rowan. That is, if she ever decides to spend the rest of her life with one man, and you’ll have to ask her about the odds on that yourself. All of which may give you some idea about our relationship.
Lily’s late father came over from Ireland and discovered that New York could use some new sewers, so he spent a lifetime building them and getting rich and powerful in the process and determining who should be elected to what office in the city and the state and sometimes Congress. Today, Lily lives in a penthouse just off Park Avenue, and at least one of her French Impressionist paintings has curators at four museums drooling.
This is fine, but more important to me are dark blue eyes and hair just a shade darker than cornsilk and the best-looking legs between Paris and Chicago, legs that are not only great to ogle, but which also move around a dance floor better than any others I’ve ever been with. Not to mention that each of us seems to have the other measured pretty well all the time, so nobody worries about playing parts or faking emotions.
“Escamillo, my love,” Lily said over coffee after dinner, “methinks your mind is a long way from Irish colleens and hockey games. No, don’t try to deny it,” she said, reaching across to squeeze my arm. “Maybe it’s intuition or whatever those women’s magazines have taken to calling it these days, but all the way down to my toes, I have a feeling that Nero Wolfe’s back at work. Or maybe it’s because you’ve scratched your right cheek just below the ear at least four times tonight, which only happens when you’re nervous, and you’re only nervous when you’re on a case. Of course I’d kill to know all about it, but you know damn well I’m not going to ask.”
I grinned and leaned across the booth to kiss Lily’s cheek—just below the right ear. “Now I see why you do so well against me when we play poker,” I said. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I rub my chin when I pair up or that my left eye twitches when I fill a straight?” She answered with a wink.
True to her word, Lily didn’t bring up the subject of Wolfe again, and I made sure my right hand stayed away from my face. The Rangers beat Boston six-five on a short-handed goal with less than three minutes to play. We cheered as loudly as any of the seventeen thousand others in the Garden, but our enthusiasm dissolved into awkward silence as soon as we were outside.
“I’m aware,” Lily said after we’d gotten a cab, “that you’re a million miles away right now. I was planning to ask you in for a brandy, but if you want to take a rain check, that’s fine. It wouldn’t hurt me to get to bed at a decent hour for a change.”
“You know of course that your knack of saying and doing precisely the right thing at the right time makes you totally irresistible to me,” I said.
“Of course I know it. I’ve bought a table for a benefit at the Churchill two weeks from tonight, and I expect you to be my consort.”
“Consider it done,” I said as we pulled up to her building. I went as far as the lobby with her, and we kissed while the hallman tactfully kept his head buried in a paperback. “Take care, Escamillo,” she said, easing out of my grasp and planting the tip of her finger on my nose. “I want to hear all about what you and Wolfe are up to—when you’re ready to talk about it.”
Back in the cab, I gave the driver a Forty-sixth Street address. About halfway through the hockey game, I’d made up my mind to try to catch Maria at her rehearsal and take her home. On the way, I hoped, I could talk her into introducing me to Uncle Milos.
My watch said eleven-fifteen when the cabbie slid to the curb in front of a brick building on a dark stretch a half-block east of Broadway. There was a stationery store at street level, with a doorway on one side with a sign above it that said “Elmar Dance Company, 2nd Floor.” I walked up a long, creaky stairway, moving toward a light at the top and the sounds of what I assumed must be dance music. The stairs ended at a small reception area with a desk and a lumpy couch and dusty photographs of dancers hanging at cockeyed angles on the walls. A hallway led farther back, to where the music was coming from.
Just as I started in the direction of the sound, a tall blonde with l
ots of eye makeup and an overnight case popped out of a doorway about halfway down, obviously on her way out.
“Hi, who you lookin’ for?” she asked, showing a mouthful of teeth that deserved to be in a chewing-gum ad. When I answered, she said Maria was changing. “Why don’t you take a seat? She’s got to pass you to get out of here.”
Three more dancers, two of them lookers, sailed by chattering before Maria came out, wearing slacks and with her hair tied back in a scarf. She saw me and stopped, but before she could say anything, I was up and smiling.
“The more I thought about it, the more I felt I should take you home tonight. Come on, we can get a cab over on Broadway. And on the way, I’ll tell you why we should see your uncle together.”
Maria frowned and shook her head. “No, I’ve told you he won’t talk to you when he finds out why you’ve come. Please, I promised on the telephone that I’d ask him tonight about seeing Mr. Wolfe.”
Walking to Broadway and then on the cab ride north, I kept pressing Maria, but whatever charm Wolfe thinks I have with women wasn’t working on this one. Her one concession was to let me come into the building with her, but only as far as the lobby. I would wait there while she went up to talk to her uncle. Then, if she needed reinforcements, she’d call down for me. I wasn’t wild about the plan, because Stefanovic didn’t sound like the type to let his niece talk him into a damn thing. But I wasn’t getting a choice.
The cab squealed to a stop in front of an undistinguished brick building in the first block east of Park. I was expecting a little more class, at least a doorman, but this place looked like dozens of other fifty-year-old buildings in the area. I paid the driver, and we went into a small, dimly lit lobby. “Tom, this is Mr. Goodwin; he’s going to wait for me here,” Maria said to the hallman, a young, weak-chinned guy who looked up from behind the counter and nodded. “I’ll come down or call down for him in a few minutes.”
I hope so, I thought as she went up in the elevator. I plopped down on one of the dark red sofas and started thumbing through a magazine that was on the coffee table. No more than two minutes had passed when the phone at the front desk rang. “Mr. Goodwin, Miss Radovich wants you to go on up,” Tom said. “It’s the ninth floor, the door to your right as you get off the elevator. You can’t miss it; there’re only two apartments to the floor.”
Either Uncle Milos wasn’t home or Maria had gotten some fast results one way or the other. Ready for the worst, I tried to prepare an approach to him as the automatic elevator growled its way up to nine. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when the doors opened.
Maria was standing in the doorway of the apartment, or more correctly, leaning against one side of it. Her eyes were open wide, but she barely acknowledged me. I put an arm around her for support as her legs began to fold up. “On the floor …” she said, covering her face with her hands. “Dead, dead, dead …”
6
I GOT MARIA INSIDE AND shut the door. We were in an entrance hall that had a chandelier and a handsome Oriental rug. I led her to a chair and eased her down as the sobs started. “Where?” I asked. She pointed to an open door at the far end of the hall. “Stay here,” I said. “Don’t try to move.”
The doorway led into a good-sized library with a high ceiling, fireplace, dark paneling, lots of bookshelves, a grand piano, and another Oriental rug, a Kashan. The body was lying facedown on the rug in one corner near a high monk-style writing desk that had a stool behind it. I knelt and made a quick check, but Maria had been right. Milan Stevens was dead, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why: The back of his white shirt was torn and stained dark red, and a fancy long-handled letter opener, one of those made to look like a sword, lay a few feet away. The blood on the opener glistened in the light, and from the look of Stevens’s shirt, that little sword had been run in and out of him several times.
I tried to freeze the scene in my mind, but there wasn’t much to freeze. None of the furniture appeared out of place, and there was no indication of a struggle. A softcover book lay open on the monk’s desk, and I covered my hand with my handkerchief as I turned the pages. It was music, plus a lot of penciled notations that might as well have been in Urdu. For the record, the cover sheet of the music said “Symphony No. 4 in E minor, for Orchestra, by Johannes Brahms, Op. 98.”
I went back to the hall, where Maria was still sitting. She’d stopped crying and now was staring straight ahead. “He is dead, isn’t he?” she asked, blinking.
“Yes. Now listen carefully; I’m going to have to call the police, and I have to do it soon. When they come, tell them everything about the notes, about going to see Mr. Wolfe, all of it. But first, I have two things to do. Please stay right here.” She nodded, but otherwise there was no reaction or expression. Shock was settling in.
I went back to the study and, using the handkerchief again, dialed the number I know best. Wolfe answered after one ring.
“The notes must have been for real,” I said. “Stevens is dead. Stabbed in his study. I’m there now, with Maria, and I’m about to call the police. Instructions?”
I could hear him draw in air and let it out slowly. “No,” he said. “I suppose you’ll have to go to headquarters?”
“Without question,” I said. “And I’ve told Maria not to keep anything from them. I figure it’s going to be a long night. I’ll report first thing in the morning, if they let me out by then.”
“Very well,” Wolfe said with disgust. “Have you eaten?” I assured him that Rusterman’s lamb chops would carry me through the night, and I went back to Maria. She hadn’t moved and gave me another mechanical nod when I told her I was going to the lobby for a couple of minutes.
Tom was still behind the counter. “Excuse me,” I said with what I hoped was a friendly smile. “Did Mr. Stevens have any guests earlier this evening, before Miss Radovich and I got here?”
He looked up with a slightly amused expression. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“He’s asleep,” I said. “And Miss Radovich had been expecting a visitor. She wondered if anyone had come by.”
Tom was sizing me up, trying to decide whether or not I was okay, and he finally made up his mind. “Well … there was one,” he said. “His name was Milner, or something like that. He came in about eight-fifteen, but didn’t stay long—maybe five minutes.”
“His first name?” I asked.
“Didn’t leave one. I just called upstairs to Mr. Stevens and told him Mr. Milner was here, and he said to send him up.”
“Did Mr. Milner say anything to you when he left?”
“Nope. Just walked on out. All I saw was his back going through the lobby.”
“And he was the only caller?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks, Tom,” I said. “You’ve leveled with me, and now I’d better tell you something. Mr. Stevens is dead—killed. The police will be here soon.”
I watched his face closely, and got the predictable openmouthed, wide-eyed look. “What? Hey, why didn’t you say that right away?” He jumped up, knocking his chair over. He looked scared. “I can’t tell them anything,” he said, swallowing hard. “It must have been that Milner guy, huh? What should I do when they come?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “They’ll want to know just what you told me. About Mr. Milner, about anything else that might have happened tonight that was unusual. Was there anything?”
He swallowed again and shook his head. “No … a real quiet night. Nothing at all.”
“Okay, Tom. One other thing: Have you ever seen Mr. Milner here before?”
He paused and screwed up his face. “I think so, maybe with Miss Radovich. But I’m not positive—I wouldn’t want to say for sure.”
I said thanks again, and left him at his post to sweat out the cops’ arrival. But they weren’t going to come until somebody called them, which I now had to do fast. When I got back upstairs, I found Maria still in the chair, zombielike. I squeezed her arm lightly and went to the study to
dial Homicide South.
“My name is Goodwin,” I told the voice that answered. “I’m reporting a murder.” I gave the address and floor, but the guy wanted more details and my full name. “Just send somebody, and they can get it all firsthand,” I said, hanging up.
It would be five, maybe ten minutes before we got company. I checked on Maria again. “The police will be here soon,” I said. “Are you all right?”
Her face was colorless, and she was shaking. I got her to tell me where the sherry was, and I filled a glass. A few sips seemed to help; she inhaled deeply and attempted a smile.
I knelt on one knee next to her chair. “I’ll take a fast look around the rest of the place before they get here, if you don’t mind. But first—do you know someone named Milner?”
It was as if I’d slapped her. “Jerry. What … how do you know him? How …” She started to get up, but I had my hand on her shoulder.
“He was here earlier tonight,” I said. “That guy at the desk just told me. He also said he thought he’d seen him here before—with you.”
Maria brushed her hair back from her face. “Yes, Jerry and I … we know each other. He’s a violinist with the orchestra. But I don’t see why he would have come here tonight. He knew I would be in rehearsals until at least …” The words trailed off, and she made a face. “Oh, no, no, he could never … no …” She closed her eyes tight and kept shaking her head until I squeezed her shoulder.
“How did he and your uncle get along?”
Maria took a deep breath. “They had very different personalities. There were some arguments, but nothing that would, that …”She turned her palms up and made a gesture of helplessness.
“Were the arguments because of you, Maria?”
She nodded, and the sobs started again. I squeezed her hands and told her to stay put while I prowled.
The place wasn’t luxurious, but it had a solid, substantial feel to it. The rooms were big and well-furnished. The cost of the Oriental rugs alone had to be more than most people spend on all their furnishings in a lifetime, and the paintings included a Cezanne on the living room wall that Lily would covet.
Murder in E Minor Page 4