by Rex Stout
“Plenty. You got her a job with that Carl Heydt. You found her a place to live, an apartment that happens to be only six blocks from here.”
I cocked my head at him. “Where did you get that? From Carl Heydt?”
“No. From her.”
“She didn’t mention Miss Rowan?”
“No.”
“Then I give her a mark. You were at her about a murder, and she didn’t want to drag in Miss Rowan. One day, the second summer she was bringing the corn, two years ago, she said she wanted a job in New York and asked if I could get her one. I doubted if she could hold a job any friend of mine might have open or might make room for, so I consulted Miss Rowan, and she took it on. She got two girls she knew to share their apartment with Sue-it’s only five blocks from here, not six-she paid for a course at the Midtown Studio-Sue has paid her back-and she got Carl Heydt to give Sue a tryout at modeling. I understand that Sue is now one of the ten most popular models in New York and her price is a hundred dollars an hour, but that’s hearsay. I haven’t seen her on a magazine cover. I didn’t get her a job or a place to live. I know Miss Rowan better than Sue does; she won’t mind my dragging her in. Anything else?”
“Plenty. When and how did you find out that Kenneth Faber had shoved you out and taken Sue over?”
“Nuts.” I turned to Wolfe. “Your Honor, I object to the question on the ground that it is insulting, impertinent, and disgusticulous. It assumes not only that I am shovable but also that I can be shoved out of a place I have never been.”
“Objection sustained.” A corner of Wolfe’s mouth was up a little. “You will rephrase the question, Mr. Cramer.”
“The hell I will.” Cramer’s eyes kept at me. “You might as well open up, Goodwin. We have a signed statement from her. What passed between you and Faber when he was here a week ago today?”
“The corn. It passed from him to me.”
“So you’re a clown. I already know that. A real wit. What else?”
“Well, let’s see.” I screwed my lips, concentrating. “The bell rang and I went and opened the door and said, quote, ‘Greetings. How’s things on the farm?’ As he handed me the carton he said, ‘Lousy, thank you, hot as hell and I’ve got blisters.’ As I took it I said, ‘What’s a few blisters if you’re the backbone of the country?’ He said, ‘Go soak your head,’ and went, and I shut the door and took the carton to the kitchen.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay.” He got up. “You don’t wear a hat. You can have one minute to get a toothbrush.”
“Now listen.” I turned a palm up. “I can throw sliders in a pinch, and do, but this is no pinch. It’s close to bedtime. If I don’t check with something in Sue McLeod’s statement, of course you want to work on me before I can get in touch with her, so go ahead, here I am.”
“The minute’s up. Come on.”
I stayed put. “No. I now have a right to be sore, so I am. You’ll have to make it good.”
“You think I won’t?” At least I had him glaring. “You’re under arrest as a material witness. Move!”
I took my time getting up. “You have no warrant, but I don’t want to be fussy.” I turned to Wolfe. “If you want me around tomorrow, you might give Parker a ring.”
“I shall.” He swiveled. “Mr. Cramer. Knowing your considerable talents as I do, I am sometimes dumfounded by your fatuity. You were so bent on baiting Mr. Goodwin that you completely ignored the point I was at pains to make.” He pointed at the piles on his desk. “Who picked that corn? Pfui!”
“That’s your point,” Cramer rasped. “Mine is who killed Kenneth Faber. Move, Goodwin.”
2
AT TWENTY MINUTES PAST ELEVEN Wednesday morning, standing at the curb on Leonard Street with Nathaniel Parker, I said, “Of course in a way it’s a compliment. Last time the bail was a measly five hundred. Now twenty grand. That’s progress.”
Parker nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it. He argued for fifty thousand, but I got it down to twenty. You know what that means. They actually- Here’s one.”
A taxi headed in to us and stopped. When we were in and I had told the driver Eighth Avenue and 35th Street, and we were rolling, Parker resumed, leaning to me and keeping his voice down. The legal mind. Hackies are even better listeners than they are talkers, and that one could be a spy sicked on us by the district attorney. “They actually,” he said, “think you may have killed that man. This is serious, Archie. I told the judge that bail in the amount that was asked would be justified only if they had enough evidence to charge you with murder, in which case you wouldn’t be bailable, and he agreed. As your counsel, I must advise you to be prepared for such a charge at any moment. I didn’t like Mandel’s attitude. By the way, Wolfe told me to send my bill to you, not him. He said this is your affair and he isn’t concerned. I’ll make it moderate.”
I thanked him. I already knew that Assistant District Attorney Mandel, and maybe Cramer too, regarded me as a real candidate for the big one. Cramer had taken me to his place, Homicide South, and after spending half an hour on me had turned me over to Lieutenant Rowcliff and gone home. Rowcliff had stood me for nearly an hour-I had him stuttering in fourteen minutes, not a record-and had then sent me under convoy to the DA’s office, where Mandel had taken me on, obviously expecting to make a night of it.
Which he did, with the help of a pair of dicks from the DA’s Homicide Bureau. He had of course been phoned to by both Cramer and Rowcliff, and it was evident from the start that he didn’t merely think I was holding out on details that might be useful, to prevent either bother for myself or trouble for someone else; he had me tagged as a real prospect. Naturally I wanted to know why, so I played along. I hadn’t with Cramer because he had got me sore in front of Wolfe, and I hadn’t with Rowcliff because playing along is impossible with a double-breasted baboon, but with Mandel I could. Of course he was asking the questions, him and the dicks, but the trick is to answer them in such a way that the next question, or maybe one later on, tells you something you want to know, or at least gives you a hint. That takes practice, but I had had plenty, and it makes it simpler when one guy pecks away at you for an hour or so and then backs off, and another guy starts in and goes all over it again.
For instance, the scene of the crime-the alley and receiving platform at the rear of Rusterman’s. Since Wolfe was the trustee, there was nothing about that restaurant I wasn’t familiar with. From the side street it was only about fifteen yards along the narrow alley to the platform, and the alley ended a few feet farther on at the wall of another building. A car or small truck entering to deliver something had to back out. Knowing, as I had, that Kenneth Faber would come with the corn sometime after five o’clock, I could have walked in and hid under the platform behind a concrete post, with the weapon in my hand, and, when Faber drove in, got out, and came around to open the tailgate, he would never know what hit him. If I could have done that, who couldn’t? I would have had to know one other thing, that I couldn’t be seen from the windows of the restaurant kitchen because the glass had been painted on the inside so boys and girls couldn’t climb onto the platform to watch Leo boning a duck or Felix stirring goose blood into a Sauce Rouennaise.
In helping them get it on the record that I knew all that, I learned only that they had found no one who had seen the murderer in the alley or entering or leaving it, that Faber had probably been dead five to ten minutes when someone came from the kitchen to the platform and found the body, and that the weapon was a piece of two-inch galvanized iron pipe sixteen and five-eighths inches long, threaded male at one end and female at the other, old and battered. Easy to hide under a coat. Where it came from might be discovered by one man in ten hours, or by a thousand men in ten years.
Getting those details was nothing, since they would be in the morning papers, but regarding their slant on me I got some hints that the papers wouldn’t have. Hints were the best I could get, no facts to check,
so I’ll just report how it looked when Parker came to spring me in the morning. They hadn’t let me see Sue’s statement, but it must have been something in it, or something she had said, or something someone else, maybe Carl Heydt or Peter Jay or Max Maslow, had said, either to her or to the cops. Or possibly something Duncan McLeod, Sue’s father, had said. That didn’t seem likely, but I included him because I saw him. When Parker and I entered the anteroom on our way out he was there on a chair in the row against the wall, dressed for town, with a necktie, his square deep-tanned face shiny with sweat. I crossed over and told him good morning, and he said it wasn’t, it was a bad morning, a day lost and no one to leave to see to things. It was no place for a talk, with people there on the chairs, but I might at least have asked him who had picked the corn if someone hadn’t come to take him inside.
So when I climbed out of the taxi at the corner and thanked Parker for the lift and told him I’d call him if and when, and walked the block and a half on 35th Street to the old brownstone, I was worse off than when I had left, since I hadn’t learned anything really useful, and no matter how Parker defined “moderate,” the cost of a twenty-grand bond is not peanuts. I couldn’t expect to pass the buck to Wolfe, since he had never seen either Kenneth Faber or Sue McLeod, and as I mounted the seven steps to the stoop and put my key in the lock I decided not to try to.
The key wasn’t enough. The door opened two inches and stopped. The chain bolt was on. I pushed the button, and Fritz came and slipped the bolt; and his face told me something was stirring before he spoke. If you’re not onto the faces you see most of, how can you expect to tell anything from strange ones? As I crossed the sill I said, “Good morning. What’s up?”
He turned from closing the door and stared. “But Archie. You look terrible.”
“I feel worse. Now what?”
“A woman to see you. Miss Susan McLeod. She used to bring-”
“Yeah. Where is she?”
“In the office.”
“Where is he?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Has he talked with her?”
“No.”
“How long has she been here?”
“Half an hour.”
“Excuse my manners. I’ve had a night.” I headed for the end of the hall, the swinging door to the kitchen, pushed it open, and entered. Wolfe was at the center table with a glass of beer in his hand. He grunted. “So. Have you slept?”
“No.”
“Have you eaten?”
I got a glass from the cupboard, went to the refrigerator and got milk, filled the glass, and took a sip. “If you could see the bacon and eggs they had brought in for me and I paid two bucks for, let alone taste it, you’d never be the same. You’d be so afraid you might be hauled in as a material witness you’d lose your nerve. They think maybe I killed Faber. For your information, I didn’t.” I sipped milk. “This will hold me till lunch. I understand I have a caller. As you told Parker, this is my affair and you are not concerned. May I take her to the front room? I’m not intimate enough with her to take her up to my room.” I sipped milk.
“Confound it,” he growled. “How much of what you told Mr. Cramer was flummery?”
“None. All straight. But he’s on me and so is the DA, and I’ve got to find out why.” I sipped milk.
He was eying me. “You will see Miss McLeod in the office.”
“The front room will do. It may be an hour. Two hours.”
“You may need the telephone. The office.”
If I had been myself I would have given that offer a little attention, but I was somewhat pooped. So I went, taking my half a glass of milk. The door to the office was closed and, entering, I closed it again. She wasn’t in the red leather chair. Since she was there for me, not for Wolfe, Fritz had moved up one of the yellow chairs for her, but hearing the door open and seeing me she had sprung up, and by the time I had shut the door and turned she was to me, gripping my arms, her head tilted back to get my eyes. If it hadn’t been for the milk I would have used my arms for one of their basic functions, since that’s a sensible way to start a good frank talk with a girl. That being impractical, I tilted my head forward and kissed her. Not just a peck. She not only took it, she helped, and her grip on my arms tightened, and I had to keep the glass plumb by feel since I couldn’t see it. It wouldn’t have been polite for me to quit, so I left it to her.
She let go, backed up a step, and said, “You haven’t shaved.”
I crossed to my desk, sipped milk, put the glass down, and said, “I spent the night at the district attorney’s office, and I’m tired, dirty, and sour. I could shower and shave and change in half an hour.”
“You’re all right.” She plumped onto the chair. “Look at me.”
“I am looking at you.” I sat. “You’d do fine for a before-and-after vitamin ad. The before. Did you get to bed?”
“I guess so, I don’t know.” Her mouth opened to pull air in. Not a yawn, just helping her nose. “It couldn’t have been a jail because the windows didn’t have bars. They kept me until after midnight asking questions, and one of them took me home. Oh yes, I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep, but I must have, because I woke up. Archie, I don’t know what you’re going to do to me.”
“Neither do I.” I drank milk, emptying the glass. “Why, have you done something to me?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Of course not.”
“It came out. You remember you explained it for me one night.”
I nodded. “I said you have a bypass in your wiring. With ordinary people like me, when words start on their way out they have to go through a checking station for an okay, except when we’re too mad or scared or something. You may have a perfectly good checking station, but for some reason, maybe a loose connection, it often gets bypassed.”
She was frowning. “But the trouble is, if I haven’t got a checking station I’m just plain dumb. If I do have one, it certainly got bypassed when the words came out about my going to meet you there yesterday.”
“Meet me where?”
“On Forty-eighth Street. There at the entrance to the alley where I used to turn in to deliver the corn to Rusterman’s. I said I was to meet you there at five o’clock and we were going to wait there until Ken came because we wanted to have a talk with him. But I was late, I didn’t get there until a quarter past five, and you weren’t there, so I left.”
I kept my shirt on. “You said that to whom?”
“To several people. I said it to a man who came to the apartment, and in that building he took me to downtown I said it to another man, and then to two more, and it was in a statement they had me sign.”
“When did we make the date to meet there? Of course they asked that.”
“They asked everything. I said I phoned you yesterday morning and we made it then.”
“It’s just possible that you are dumb. Didn’t you realize they would come to me?”
“Why, of course. And you would deny it. But I thought they would think you just didn’t want to be involved, and I said you weren’t there, and you could probably prove you were somewhere else, so that wouldn’t matter, and I had to give them some reason why I went there and then came away without even going in the restaurant to ask if Ken had been there.” She leaned forward. “Don’t you see, Archie? I couldn’t say I had gone there to see Ken, could I?”
“No. Okay, you’re not dumb.” I crossed my legs and leaned back. “You had gone there to see Ken?”
“Yes. There was something-about something.”
“You got there at a quarter past five?”
“Yes.”
“And came away without even going in the restaurant to ask if Ken had been there?”
“I didn’t- Yes, I came away.”
I shook my head. “Look, Sue. Maybe you didn’t want to get me involved, but you have, and I want to know. If you went there to see Ken and got there at a quarter past five, you did see him. Didn’t you?”
“I didn’t see him alive.” Her hands on her lap, very nice hands, were curled into fists. “I saw him dead. I went up the alley and he was there on the ground. I thought he was dead, but, if he wasn’t, someone would soon come out and find him, and I was scared. I was scared because I had told him just two days ago that I would like to kill him. I didn’t think it out, I didn’t stop to think, I was just scared. I didn’t realize until I was several blocks away how dumb that was.”
“Why was it dumb?”
“Because Felix and the doorman had seen me. When I came I passed the front of the restaurant, and they were there on the sidewalk, and we spoke. So I couldn’t say I hadn’t been there and it was dumb to go away, but I was scared. When I got to the apartment I thought it over and decided what to say, about going there to meet you, and when a man came and started asking questions I told him about it before he asked.” She opened a fist to gesture. “I did think about it, Archie. I did think it couldn’t matter to you, not much.”
That didn’t gibe with the bypassing-the-checking-station theory, but there was no point in making an issue of it. “You thought wrong,” I said, not complaining, just stating a fact. “Of course they asked you why we were going to meet there to have a talk with Ken, since he would be coming here. Why not here instead of there?”
“Because you didn’t want to. You didn’t want to talk with him here.”
“I see. You really thought it over. Also they asked what we wanted to talk with him about. Had you thought about that?”
“Oh, I didn’t have to. About what he had told you, that I thought I was pregnant and he was responsible.”