by Rex Stout
He let the book down a little. “What the devil are you into now?”
“That’s the report. Ten minutes will do it, fifteen at the outside, even verbatim.”
He inserted a bookmark and put the book on the desk. “Well?”
I started in, verbatim, and by the time I was telling Vance he should install closed-circuit television he was leaning back with his eyes closed. Merely force of habit. When I mentioned the title of the privately printed book he made a noise-he says all music is a vestige of barbarism-and when I came to the end he snorted and opened his eyes.
“I don’t believe it,” he said flatly. “You’ve omitted something. A death by violence, and, not involved and with no commitment, you left? Nonsense.” He straightened up.
I nodded. “You’re not interested and you don’t intend to be, so you didn’t bother to look at it. I was present at the discovery of a dead body, obviously murdered. If I had hung around I would have been stuck. In another minute the cop would have ordered us to stay put, and he would have taken my name and recognized it. When Homicide came, probably Stebbins but no matter who, he would have learned why I was there, if not from me, then from Vance, and he would have taken the envelope and letterhead and necktie, and I wanted them for souvenirs. As I told Vance, they are actually and legally in my possession.”
“Pfui.”
“I disagree. Of course I would have liked to stay long enough to get a sample of that blood to have it compared with the spot on the tie. If it was the same I would be the first to know it and it’s nice to be first. Also of course, Vance will tell them about me, and the question is can I be hooked for obstructing justice if I refuse to hand over the tie? I don’t see how; There’s nothing to connect it with the homicide until and unless her blood is compared with the spot.”
Wolfe granted. “Flummery. Provoking the police is permissible only when it serves a purpose.”
“Certainly. And if James Neville Vance comes or calls to say that he expects to be charged with the murder of Mrs. Kirk, if that’s who she was, partly because of the tie he didn’t send me, and he wants to hire you, wouldn’t it be convenient to have the tie? And the envelope and letterhead?”
“I have no expectation of being engaged by Mr. Vance. Nor desire.”
“Sure. Because you would have to work. I remarked yesterday that the gross take for the first seven months of nineteen sixty-two is nine grand behind nineteen sixty-one. I am performing one of the main functions you pay me for.”
“Not brilliantly,” he said and picked up the book. Merely a childish gesture, since Fritz would enter in eight minutes to announce lunch. I went and opened the safe and stashed my souvenirs on a shelf in the inner compartment.
3
INSPECTOR CRAMER of Homicide South came at ten minutes past six.
I had been functioning all afternoon, I don’t say brilliantly. During lunch, in the dining room across the hall, while listening to Wolfe’s table talk with one ear, I decided to make myself scarce while I considered the matter. There was no sense in getting out on a limb just for the hell of it, and a homicide dick might show any minute, so as we left the table I told Wolfe that since we had no expectations or desires I was going out on some personal chores. He gave me a sharp glance, made a face, and headed for the office. As I was turning to the front the phone rang and I went in and got it. If it was the DA’s office inviting me to call, I would make up my mind on the way downtown.
It was Lon Cohen. He had compliments. “No question about it, Archie,” he said, “you’d be worth your weight in blood rubies to any newspaper in town, especially the Gazette. At nine-thirty you phone for dope on James Neville Vance. At twelve-twenty, less than three hours later, a cop finds a body in his house and both you and he are present. Marvelous. Any leg man can find out what happened, but knowing what’s going to happen-you’re one in ten million. What’s on the program for tomorrow? I only want a day at a time.”
I was a little short with him because my problem was the program for today.
I was out of the house and halfway to Eighth Avenue, no destination in mind, when I realized I was ignoring the main point-no, two main points. One, if a dick came before Wolfe went up to the plant rooms at four o’clock, Wolfe might possibly give him the souvenirs, to keep me out of trouble. Two, if the spot on the tie wasn’t blood and its being sent to me was just some kind of a gag, and it had no connection with a murder, I was stewing about nothing. So I turned and went back. Wolfe, at his desk with his book, apparently paid no attention as I opened the safe and took out the souvenirs, but of course he saw. I pocketed them and left.
Twenty minutes later I was seated in a room on the tenth floor of a building on 43rd Street, telling a man at a desk, “This is for me personally, Mr. Hirsh, not for Mr. Wolfe, but it’s possible that he may have a use for it before long.” I put the tie on the desk and pointed to the spot. “How long will it take to tell what that is?”
He bent his head for a look without touching it. “Maybe ten minutes, maybe a week.”
“How long will it take to tell if it’s blood?”
He got a glass from a drawer and took another look. “It’s a fairly fresh stain. That it isn’t blood, negative for hemoglobin, ten minutes. That it is blood, thirty or forty minutes. That it is or isn’t human blood, up to ninety minutes, maybe less. To type it with certainty if it’s human, at least five hours.”
“I only need yes or no on the human. Would you have to ruin the whole spot?”
“Oh, no. Just a few threads.”
“Okay, I’ll wait. As I say, it’s not for Mr. Wolfe, but I’ll appreciate it very much. I’ll be in the anteroom.”
“You might as well wait here.” He rose, with the tie. “I’ll have to do it myself. It’s vacation time and we’re shorthanded.”
An hour and a half later, at twenty minutes to five, I was in a down elevator, the tie back in my pocket minus only a few threads. It was human blood, and the stain was less than a week old, probably much less. So I wasn’t in a stew for nothing, but now what? Of course I could go back to the office and try for fingerprints on the envelope and letterhead, but that would have been just passing time since I had nothing to compare them with. Or I could phone James Neville Vance, tell him what the spot was, and ask if he now had any ideas or suggestions, but that would have been pushing it, since I didn’t know whether he had told the cops why I was there.
Considering, as I emerged to the sidewalk, how little I did know, next to nothing, that it was either go home and sit on it or learn something somehow, and that the Gazette building was only a five-minute walk, I turned east at 44th Street. Lon Cohen’s room is on the twentieth floor, two doors down the hall from the corner office of the publisher. When I walked in, having been announced, he was at one of the three phones on his desk, and I sat. When he hung up he swiveled and said, “No welcome. If you were a real pal you would have told me this morning and we could have had a photographer there.”
“Next time.” I crossed my legs to show that we had all day. “You will now please tell me whose body I helped discover and go on from there. I’ve got amnesia.”
“The twilight edition will be on the stands in half an hour and costs a dime.”
“Sure, but I want it all, not only what’s fit to print.”
Before I left, nearly an hour later, he had two journalists up from downstairs. The crop that can be brought in on a hot one, including pictures, in less than five hours, makes you proud to be an American. For instance, there was a photo of Mrs. Martin Kirk, then Miss Bonny Sommers, in a bikini on a beach in 1958.
I’ll stick to the essentials. Bonny Sommers had been a secretary in a prominent firm of architects, and a year ago, at the age of twenty-five, she had married one of its not-yet-prominent young men, Martin Kirk, age thirty-three. There were contradictions as to how soon it had started to sour, but none on the fact that Kirk had moved out two weeks ago, to a hotel room. If he had developed a conflicting interest, its o
bject hadn’t been spotted, but efforts to find and identify it were in process. As for Bonny, it was established that she was inclined to experiments, but the details needed further inquiry and were getting it. Four names were mentioned in that connection. One of them was James Neville Vance, and another was Paul Fougere, the tenant, with his wife, of the ground floor of Vance’s house. Fougere was an electronics technician and vice-president of Audivideo, Inc.
As for today, Kirk had phoned police headquarters a little before noon, saying that he had dialed his wife’s number six times in eighteen hours and got no answer; that he had gone to the house around eleven o’clock, got no response to his ring from the vestibule, used his key to get in, pushed the button at the apartment door repeatedly and heard the bell, without result, and departed without entering; and that he wanted the police to take a look. He had been asked to be there to let a cop use his key but had declined.
Bonny Kirk had last been seen alive, to present knowledge, by a man from a package store who had delivered a bottle of vodka to her at the apartment door, and been paid by her, a little before one o’clock Monday afternoon. The unopened vodka bottle, found under the couch with blood on it, had been used to smash Bonny Kirk’s skull sometime between one P.M. and eight P.M. Monday, the latter limit having been supplied by the medical examiner.
Among those who had been summoned or escorted to the DA’s office were Martin Kirk, James Neville Vance, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Fougere, and Bert Odom, the janitor. Presumably some of them, perhaps all, were still there.
For all that and a lot more I’m leaving out I didn’t owe Lon anything, since on our give-and-take record to date I had a credit balance, and I didn’t mention the necktie. Of course he wanted to know who Wolfe’s client was and what about Vance, and it never hurts to have Wolfe’s name in the paper, not to mention mine, but since the whole point was that Wolfe was short on clients I decided to save it. Naturally he didn’t believe it, that Wolfe had no client, and when I got up to go he said, “No welcome and no fare you well either.”
I took a taxi because Wolfe likes to find me in the office when he comes down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, and he pays me and I had spent the day on personal chores, but with the traffic at that hour I might as well have walked, and it was ten past six when the hackie finally made it. As I was climbing out, a car I recognized pulled up just behind, and as I stood a man I also recognized got out of it-a big solid specimen with a big red face topped by an old felt hat even on a hot August day. As he approached I greeted him, “I’ll be damned. You yourself?”
Ignoring me, he called to my hackie, “Where did you get this fare?” Apparently the hackie recognized Inspector Cramer of Homicide South, for he called back, “Forty-second and Lexington, Inspector.”
“All right, move on.” To me: “We’ll go in.”
I shook my head. “I’ll save you the trouble. Mr. Wolfe has a new book and there’s no point in annoying him. The tie was mailed to me, not him, and he knows nothing about it and doesn’t want to.”
“I’d rather get that from him. Come on.”
“Nothing doing. He’s sore enough as it is, and so am I. I’ve wasted a day. I’ve learned that the spot on the tie is human blood, but what-”
“How did you learn that?”
“I had it tested at a laboratory.”
“You did.” His face got redder. “You left the scene of a crime, withholding information. Then you tampered with evidence. If you think-”
“Nuts. Evidence of what? Even with blood it’s not evidence if it isn’t the same type as the victim’s. As for leaving the scene, I wasn’t concerned and no one told me to stay. As for tampering, it’s still a perfectly good spot with just a few threads gone. I had to know if it was blood because if it wasn’t I was going to keep it, and if a court ordered me to fork it over I would have fought it. I wanted to find out who had sent it to me and why, and I still do. But since it’s blood I couldn’t fight an order.” I got the souvenirs from my pockets. “Here. When you’re through with them I want them back.”
“You do.” He took them and looked them over. “There’s a typewriter in Vance’s place. Did you take a sample from it for comparison?”
“You know damn well I didn’t, since he has told you what I said and did.”
“He could forget. Is this the tie you got in the mail this morning and is this the envelope it came in?”
“Yes. Now that’s an idea. I could have got another set from Vance. I wish I’d thought of it.”
“You could have. I know you. I’m taking you down, but we’ll go in first. I want to ask Wolfe a question.”
“I’m not going in, and one will get you ten you won’t get in. He’s not interested and doesn’t intend to be. I could come down after dinner. We’re having lobsters, simmered in white wine with tarragon, and a white wine sauce with the tomalley and coral-”
“I’m taking you.” He aimed a thumb at the car. “Get in.”
4
I GOT HOME well after midnight and before going up two flights to bed hit the refrigerator for leftover lobster and a glass of milk, to remove both hunger and the taste of the excuse for bread and stringy corned beef I had been supplied with at the DA’s office.
Since my connection with their homicide had been short and simple, the twenty seconds I had spent in the Kirk apartment, and my connection with Vance hadn’t been a lot longer, an hour of me should have been more than enough, including typing the statement for me to sign, and it wasn’t until after nine o’clock that I realized, from a question by Assistant DA Mandel, what the idea was. They actually thought that the tie thing might be some kind of dodge that I had been in on, and they were keeping me until they got a report on the stain. So I cooled down and took it easy, got on speaking terms with a dick who was put in a room with me to see that I didn’t jump out a window, got him to produce a deck for some friendly gin, and in two hours managed to lose $4.70. I called time at that point and paid him because he was getting sleepy and it would have been next to impossible to keep him ahead.
I got my money’s worth. Around midnight someone came and called him out, and when he returned ten minutes later and said I was no longer needed I gave him a friendly grin, a good loser, no hard feelings, and said, “So the blood’s the same type, huh?” And he nodded and said, “Yeah, modern science is wonderful.”
So, I told myself as I got the lobster out, I got not only my money’s worth but my time’s worth, and by the time I was upstairs and in my pajamas I had decided that if Wolfe wasn’t interested I certainly was, and I was going to find out who had sent me that tie even if I had to take a month’s leave of absence.
Except in emergencies I get a full eight hours’ sleep, and that was merely a project, not an emergency, so I didn’t get down for breakfast, which I eat in the kitchen, until after ten o’clock. As I got orange juice from the refrigerator and Fritz started the burner under the cake griddle he asked where I had dined, and I said he knew darned well I hadn’t dined at all, since I had phoned that I was at the DA’s office, and he nodded and said, “These clients in trouble.”
“Look, Fritz,” I told him, “you’re a chef, not a diplomat, so why do you keep that up? You know we’ve had no client for a month and you want to know if we’ve hooked one, so why don’t you just ask? Repeat after me, ‘Have we got a client?’ Try it.”
“Archie.” He turned a palm up. “You would have to say yes or no. The way I do it, you can biaiser if you wish.”
I had to ask him how to spell it so I could look it up when I went to the office. Sitting, I picked up the Times, and my brow went up when I saw that it had made the front page. Probably on account of Martin Kirk; the Times loves architects as much as it hates disk jockeys and private detectives. It had nothing useful to add to what I had got from Lon, but it mentioned that Mrs. Kirk had been born in Manhattan, Kansas. Any other paper which had dug up that detail would have had a feature piece about born in Manhattan and died in Manhattan.
After three griddle cakes with homemade sausage and one with thyme honey, and two cups of coffee, I made it to the office in time to have the desks dusted, fresh water in the vase, biaiser looked up, and the mail opened, when Wolfe came down from the plant rooms. I waited until the orchids were in the vase and he had sat and glanced through the mail to tell him that it now looked as if someone had sent me a hot piece of evidence in a homicide, and I intended to find out why, of course on my own time, and anyway he wouldn’t be needing me since apparently there was nobody that needed him.
His lips tightened. “Evidence? Merely a conjecture.”
“No, sir. I took it to Ludlow and it’s human blood. So I gave it to Cramer. Of course you’ve read the Times?”
“Yes.”
“The blood is the same type as Mrs. Kirk’s. If it was or is a floundering numskull, obviously I’d better see-”
The doorbell rang.
I got up and went, telling myself it was even money it was James Neville Vance, but it wasn’t. A glance at the one-way glass panel in the front door settled that. It was a panhandler who had run out of luck and started ringing doorbells-a tall, lanky one pretending he had to lean against the jamb to keep himself upright. Opening the door, I said politely, “It’s a hard life. Good morning.”
He got me in focus with bleary eyes and said, “I would like to see Nero Wolfe. My name is Martin Kirk.”
If you think I should have recognized him from the pictures Lon had shown me, I don’t agree. You should have seen him. I told him Mr. Wolfe saw people only by appointment, but I’d ask. “You’re the Martin Kirk who lives at Two-nineteen Horn Street?”
He said he was, and I invited him in, ushered him into the front room and to a seat, which he evidently needed, went to the office by way of the connecting door, closed the door, and crossed to Wolfe’s desk. “I’m on my own time now,” I told him. “It’s Martin Kirk. He asked to see you, but of course you’re not interested. May I use the front room?”