Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25

by Before Midnight

  “They have gone?” Wolfe asked.

  “Yes, sir. No comment.”

  Rollins was comfortable in the red leather chair, right at home, though one about half the size would have been better for him. He hadn’t shrunk from underfeeding like Carol Wheelock; he looked healthy enough, what there was of him. Nor was there much to his face except a wide flexible mouth and glasses in thick black frames. You didn’t see his nose and chin at all unless you concentrated.

  It’s hard to tell with glasses like those, but apparently he was returning my regard. “Your name’s Goodwin, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I admitted it.

  “Then it was you who sicked that man Younger on me. You don’t expect me to be grateful, do you? I’m not.” He switched to Wolfe. “We might as well start right. I made this appointment, and kept it, only to pass the time. I’m in this grotesque imbroglio, with no discoverable chance of emerging with honor and dignity, so why miss an opportunity of meeting an eminent bloodhound?” He smiled and shook his head. “No offense intended. I am hardly in a position to offend anybody. What are we going to talk about?”

  Wolfe was contemplating him. “I suggest, Mr. Rollins, that your despair is excessive. My client is the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, but in many respects your interest runs with theirs, and their honor and dignity are involved with yours. Both may be salvaged; and in addition, you may get a substantial amount of money. You didn’t like what Mr. Younger proposed?”

  He was still smiling. “Of course I know I should make allowances.”

  “For Mr. Younger?”

  “For all of you. Your frame of reference is utterly different from mine, in fact to me it seems quite contemptible, but it was my own thoughtlessness that got me entangled in it. I dug my own grave, that’s true; but, realizing and confessing it, I may still resent the slime and the worms. Can you get me back my job?”

  “Job?”

  “Yes. I am a professor of history at Bemis College, but I won’t be very long. It will amuse you to hear—no, that’s not the right way to look at it. It will amuse me to tell you; that’s better. One day last September a colleague showed me an advertisement of this contest, and said facetiously that as a student and teacher of history I should be interested. As a puzzle the thing was so obvious it was inane, and so was the second one, which my colleague also showed me. I was curious as to how long the inanity would be maintained, and got others as they appeared, and before long I found I was being challenged. I made a point of getting them without referring to any book, but the twelfth one so distracted me that I broke that ban just to get rid of it.”

  He screwed up his lips. “Have I said that I hadn’t entered the contest?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I hadn’t. I regarded it as a diversion, an amusing toy. But after I had solved the twentieth and last, which I must confess was rather ingenious, I sent in an entry blank with my answers. If you were to ask me why I did so I would be at a loss. I suppose in the lower strata of my psyche the primitive lusts are slopping around in the mire, and somehow they managed it; they are not in direct communication with me. The next day I was appalled at what I had done. I had a professorship at the age of thirty-six; I was a serious and able scholar with two books to my credit; and I had well-defined ambitions which I was determined to realize. If I won a prize in a perfume contest—a perfume called Pour Amour—it would be a blemish on my career, and if I won a sensational one, a half or a quarter of a million, I would never live it down.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “But you won’t believe I was appalled, because when I was notified that I was in a tie with seventy-one others, and was sent five new verses to solve in a week, I had the answers in four days and sent them in. I can only plead that schizophrenia must have many forms and manifestations, or I could resort to demonology. I was once much impressed by Roskoff’s Geschichte des Teufels. Anyhow, I sent the answers, and was asked to come to New York, and arrived just twenty-four hours ago; and now I’m involved not only in a perfume contest—Pour Amour Rollins they’ll call me—but in a murder, a nationwide cause célèbre. I am done for. If I don’t resign I’ll be fired. Can you get me a job?”

  I was wishing he would take his glasses off so I could see his eyes. From his easy posture and his voice and his superior smile he was taking it well, a manly and gallant bozo refusing to squirt blood under the wheels of calamity. But without more sales pressure I wasn’t buying the notion that one definition of “calamity” was half a million bucks, even for a man as highly educated as him, and I wanted to see his eyes. All I could see was the reflection of the ceiling light from the lenses.

  “You’re in a fix,” Wolfe admitted, “but I still think your despair is excessive. Establish academic scholarships with your prize money.”

  “I’ve thought of that. It wouldn’t help much.” He smiled. “The simplest way would be to confess to the murder. That would do it.”

  “Not without corroboration. Could you furnish any?”

  “I’m afraid not. I couldn’t describe his apartment, and I don’t know what kind of gun was used.”

  “Then it would be hopeless. Perhaps a better expedient, expose the murderer and become a public hero. The acclaim would smother the infamy. You are not a bloodhound by profession, I know, but you have cerebral resources. You could start by recalling all the details of the meeting last evening. How did they act and talk? What signs of greed or zealotry did they display? Particularly, what did they say and do when Mr. Dahlmann showed the paper and said it was the answers?”

  “Nothing. Nothing whatever.”

  “It was a shock, naturally. But afterward?”

  “Not afterward either.” The smile was getting more superior. “I would suppose you wouldn’t need to be told what the atmosphere was like. We were tigers crouching to spring upon the same prey. Vultures circling to swoop and be first on the carcass to get the heart and liver. The amenities were forced and forged. We separated immediately after the meeting, each clutching his envelope, each wishing the others some crippling misfortune, anything up to death.”

  “Then you have no idea which of them, if any, thought Mr. Dahlmann was joking.”

  “Not the faintest.”

  “Did you?”

  “Ah,” Rollins looked pleased. “This is more like it, only I thought you would be more subtle. The police wouldn’t believe my answer, and you won’t either. I really don’t know. I was in a sort of nightmare. My demon had brought me there with the single purpose of winning the contest by my own wit and ingenuity. Whether the paper he showed us held the answers or not was a matter of complete indifference to me. If careless chance had put it in my way I would have burned it without looking at it, at the dictate not of conscience, but of pride. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t say if I thought Dahlmann was joking or not because I didn’t think one way or the other. Now you want to know what I did last evening after the meeting.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “Not especially. You have told the police, of course, and they’re much better equipped to trace movements and check alibis than I am. And I’m not investigating the murder.”

  “Exactly what are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to find a way to settle the contest in a manner acceptable to all parties. You say Mr. Younger spoke to you? What did he say?”

  “He told me what Goodwin told him about Miss Frazee, and he wanted Mrs. Wheelock and me to join him in getting a lawyer and starting legal action. But also he wanted us to propose to Miss Tescher and Miss Frazee that the amount of the first five prizes will be divided equally among us. I told him we couldn’t very well do both.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “Neither. Since I have to pay the piper I’m going to dance. Dahlmann said these verses are much more obscure than any of the others, and I believe him. I doubt if Miss Frazee’s friends can get any of them, and I’ll be surprised if Miss Tescher can. When I leave here I’m going to one of the finest private libr
aries in New York and spend the night there, and I already know which book I’ll go to first. This is one of the verses:

  “From Jack I learned love all the way,

  And to the altar would be led;

  But on my happy wedding day

  I married Charles instead.”

  He lifted his hand to his glasses, but only shifted them a little on his nose. “Does that suggest anything to you?”

  “No,” Wolfe said emphatically.

  “It does to me. Not any detail of it, but the flavor. I have no idea what her name was, but I think I know where to find her. I may be wrong, but I doubt it, and if not, there’s one right off.”

  He probably had it. Either he had had a lucky hunch, or he knew a lot about flavors, or he had got the paper from Dahlmann’s wallet and was preparing the ground for a later explanation of how and where he got the answers. I could certainly have impressed him by asking if the book he would go to first would be Jacques Casanova’s Memoirs, but he might have suspected me if I had also told him her name was Christine and he should try Volume Two, pages one hundred seventy-two to two hundred one, of the Adventuros edition.

  Wolfe said abruptly, “Then I mustn’t keep you, if you’re going to work. I wouldn’t care to stir the choler of a demon.” He put his hands on the desk edge to push his chair back, and arose. “I hope to see you again, Mr. Rollins, but I shall try to interfere as little as may be with your labors. You will excuse me.” He headed for the door and was gone.

  Rollins looked at me. “What was that, pique? Or did I betray myself and he has gone for handcuffs?”

  “Forget it.” I stood up. “Don’t you smell anything?”

  He sniffed. “Nothing in particular. What is it?”

  “Of course,” I conceded, “you’re not a bloodhound. It’s shad roe in casserole with parsley, chervil, shallot, marjoram, bay leaf, and cream. That’s his demon, or one of them. He has an assortment. You’re going? If you don’t mind, what was Number Nine? I think it was. It goes:

  “By the law himself had earlier made

  I could not be his legal wife;

  The law he properly obeyed

  And loved me all my life.”

  He had turned at the door, and his smile was super-superior. “That was palpable. Aspasia and Pericles.”

  “Oh, sure. I should have known.”

  We went to the hall and I held his coat. As I opened the door he inquired, “Wasn’t that Miss Tescher here when I came?”

  I told him yes.

  “Who were the three men?”

  “Advisers she brought along. You should have heard them. They talked Mr. Wolfe into a corner.”

  He thought he was going to ask me more, vetoed it, and went. I shut the door and started for the kitchen to tell Wolfe about Aspasia and Pericles, but the phone ringing pulled me into the office. I answered it, had a brief exchange with the caller, and then went to the kitchen, where Wolfe was in conference with Fritz, and told him:

  “Talbott Heery will be here at a quarter past nine.”

  Already on edge, he roared. “I will not gallop through my dinner!”

  I told him, apologetically, that I was afraid he’d have to. He only had an hour and a half.

  Chapter 9

  The subject of discussion at Wolfe’s dinner table, whether we had company or not, might be anything from politics to polio, so long as it wasn’t current business. Business was out. That evening was no exception, strictly speaking, but it came close. Apparently at some time during the day Wolfe had found time to gallop through the encyclopedia article on cosmetics, and at dinner he saw fit, intermittently, to share it with me. He started, when we had finished the chestnut soup and were waiting for Fritz to bring the casserole, by quoting verbatim a bill which he said had been introduced into the English Parliament in 1770. It ran, he said:

  “All women of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree, whether virgins, maids, or widows, that shall, from and after this Act, impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony, any of His Majesty’s subjects, by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high heeled shoes, bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanors and the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.”

  I asked him what Spanish wool was, and had him. He didn’t know, and because he can’t stand not knowing the meaning of any word or phrase he sees or hears, I asked why he hadn’t looked in the dictionary, and he said he had but it wasn’t there. Another item was that Mary Queen of Scots bathed in wine regularly, and so did the elder ladies of the court, but the younger ones couldn’t afford it and had to use milk. Another was that when they found unguent vases in old Egyptian tombs they had dug into, the aromatics in them were still fragrant, after thirty-five hundred years. Another, that Roman fashion leaders at the time of Caesar’s wife bleached their hair with a kind of soap that came from Gaul. Another, that Napoleon liked Josephine to use cosmetics and got them for her from Martinique. Another, that Cleopatra and other Egyptian babes painted the under side of their eyes green, and the lid, lashes, and eyebrows black. For the black they used kohl, and put it on with an ivory stick.

  I admitted it was very interesting, and made no remark about how helpful it would be in finding out who swiped Dahlmann’s wallet, since that would have touched on business. Even after we finished with cheese and coffee and left the dining room to cross the hall to the office, I let him digest in peace, and went to my desk and dialed Lily Rowan’s number. When I told her I wouldn’t be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words. While we were talking the doorbell rang, but Fritz had been told about Heery, so I went ahead and finished the conversation properly. When I hung up and swiveled, Heery was in the red leather chair.

  He measured up to it, both vertically and horizontally, much better than either Rollins or Mrs. Wheelock. In a dinner jacket, with the expanse of white shirt front, he looked broader even than before. Apparently he had been glancing around, for he was saying, “This is a very nice room. Very personal. You like yellow, don’t you?”

  “Evidently,” Wolf muttered. Such remarks irritate him. Since the drapes and couch cover and cushions and five visible chairs were yellow, it did seem a little obvious.

  “Yellow is a problem,” Heery declared. “It has great advantages, but also it has a lot of drawbacks. Yellow streak. Yellow journalism. Yellow fever. It’s very popular for packaging, but Louis Dahlmann wouldn’t let me use it. Formerly I used it a great deal. Seeing all your yellow made me think of him.”

  “I doubt,” Wolfe said drily, “if you needed my décor to remind you of Mr. Dahlmann at this juncture.”

  “That’s funny,” Heery said, perfectly serious.

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Anyway, it is, because it’s wrong. That’s the first time I’ve thought of him today. Ten seconds after I heard he was dead, and how he had died, I was in a stew about the effect on the contest and my business, and I’m still in it. I haven’t had any room for thinking about Louis Dahlmann. Have you seen all the contestants?”

  “Four of them. Mr. Goodwin saw Mr. Younger.”

  “Have you got anywhere?”

  Wolfe hated to work right after dinner. He said testily, “I report only to my client, Mr. Heery.”

  “That’s funny too. Your client is Lippert, Buff and Assa. I’m one of their biggest accounts—their commission on my business last year was over half a million. I’m paying all the expenses of the contest, and of course the prizes. And you won’t even tell me if you’ve got anywhere?”

  “Certainly not.” Wolfe frowned at him. “Are you really as silly as you sound? You know quite well what my obligation to my client is. You have a simple recourse: get one of them on the phone and have me instructed—preferably Mr. Buff or Mr. Assa.”

  It seeme
d a good spot for Heery to offer to knock his block off, but instead he got to his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets, and looked around, apparently for something to look at, for he marched across to the globe and stood there staring at it. His back looked even broader than his front. Pretty soon he turned and came back and sat down.

  “Have they paid you a retainer?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  He took a thin black leather case from his breast pocket, opened it and tore off a strip of blue paper, produced a midget fountain pen, put the paper on the table at his elbow, and wrote. After putting the pen and case away he reached to send the paper fluttering onto Wolfe’s desk and said, “There’s ten thousand dollars. I’m your client now, or my firm is. If you want more say so.”

  Wolfe reached for the check, tore it across, again, again, and leaned to the right to drop it in the wastebasket. He straightened up. “Mr. Heery. I am never too complaisant when my digestion is interrupted, and you are trying me. You might as well go.”

  I’ll be damned if Heery didn’t look at me. Wanting to save him the embarrassment of offering me a twenty, possibly even a C, to put him back on the track, and getting another turndown, and also thinking that if Wolfe wanted his nose pushed in I might as well help, I met his eyes and told him, “When you do go, if you’re still looking for a better time and place there’s a little yard out back.”

  He burst out laughing—a real good hearty laugh. He stopped long enough to say, “You’re a team, you two,” and then laughed some more. We sat and looked at him. He took out a folded handkerchief and coughed into it a couple of times, and was sober.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you how it is.”

  “I know how it is.” Wolfe was good and sore.

  “No, you don’t. I went about it the wrong way, so I’ll start over. LBA has a good deal at stake in this mess, I know that, but I have more. If this contest explodes in my face it could ruin me. Will you listen?”

  Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed. “I’m listening,” he muttered.