by Rex Stout
He was almost certainly a distinguished citizen. It had never occurred to me that a private detective could get away with it. Not Nero Wolfe. He’s a citizen, and he’s distinguished, but a distinguished citizen, no.
It was a very pleasant evening. He liked the idea of eating in the room. When I said I would phone room service for a menu, he said it wasn’t necessary because the only things they knew how to cook were roast beef, hashed brown potatoes, and apple pie. If I reported the whole evening for you, you wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did, because mostly we talked shop. Take tailing. He knew all the tricks I had ever heard of, and, because he had been working in Racine for twenty years and everybody knew him, he had had to invent some twists that even Saul Panzer would be glad to use.
But of course the point was Susan Brooke. I didn’t mention her until after we had got acquainted and had finished with the meal, which was okay, and the dishes had been taken away. All I told him was that a client was considering taking her as a partner in an important project, that anything he could tell me about her would be strictly confidential, and that he would not be quoted. I would have been disappointed in him if he hadn’t asked who the client was. He did. He would have been disappointed in me if I had told him. I didn’t.
He took his pipe from his mouth and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “Memories,” he said. He plumbed his head. “I did some jobs for Susan Brooke’s father. Quite a few. I could give you a line on him, but he’s dead. She was just one of the kids around town, even if her name was Brooke, and as far as I know she was never in any trouble worth mentioning. I suppose you know she went away to college.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And then New York. The years she was at college she wasn’t here much even in the summers; she and her mother took trips. In the last eight or nine years I don’t think Susan Brooke has been in Racine more than four or five months altogether. The past four years she hasn’t been here at all.”
“Then I’m wasting the client’s money. But I understand she came here, came home, when she finished college. In nineteen fifty-nine. But maybe you wouldn’t know; her father was dead then. Not long after that they left for New York. Do you happen to know how long after?”
He pulled on his pipe, found it was out, and lit it. Through the smoke screen he said, “I don’t know why you’re trying to sneak up on me like this. If you want to ask me about that man that killed himself, go ahead and ask, but I don’t know much.”
I usually manage my face fairly well, but with him there was no reason to be on gaard, and it showed. What showed was how that “man that killed himself” hit me. Here, all of a sudden, was dirt. It might even be the blackest dirt, such as that she had killed a man and got it passed off as suicide. The way it hit me, it was obvious that not only had I not expected to find anything much, I hadn’t wanted to.
Drucker asked, “What’s the matter? Did you think I wouldn’t know I was being played?”
I produced a grin. “You don’t. Even if I wanted to try playing you, for practice, I know damn well I couldn’t. I know nothing about the man that killed himself. I was merely checking on Susan Brooke in Racine. Maybe you’re playing me?”
“No. As soon as you mentioned Susan Brooke, naturally I supposed that was the item you were checking on.”
“It wasn’t. I knew nothing about it. You said go ahead and ask. Okay, I ask.”
“Well.” He pulled at the pipe. “It was that summer when she was back from college. A young man came to town to see her, and he was seeing her, or trying to. At twenty minutes to six in the afternoon of Friday, August fourteenth, nineteen fifty-nine, he came out of the house, the Brooke house, stood on the parch, pulled a gun from his pocket, a Marley thirty-eight, and shot himself in the temple. You say you didn’t know about it?”
“Yes. I did not. Was there any doubt about it?”
“None at all. Three people saw it happen. Two women on the sidewalk in front of the house and a man across the street. You would like to know about Susan Brooke, where did she fit in, but I can’t tell you of my own knowledge. I only know what was printed and what a friend of mine told me who was in a position to know. The man was a college boy, Harvard. He had been pestering her to marry him, and he came to Racine to pester her some more, and she and her mother gave him the boot, so he checked out. As you know, that happens, though personally it is beyond what I can understand. There may be good and sufficient reasons for a man to kill himself, but I will never see that one of them is a woman saying no. Of course it’s a form of disease. You’re not married.”
“No. Are you?”
“I was. She left me. It hurt my pride, but I’ve slept better ever since. Another thing, if a man and wife are together the way they should be, it’s natural and healthy for them to talk about his work, and a private detective can’t do that. Can he?”
We started talking shop and kept at it for more than an hour. I didn’t try to get him back on Susan Brooke. But when he left, around ten o’clock, I told myself that the Globe was a morning paper, so the staff would be there now, and if her past was a vital element in an investigation of great moment, I would go and take a look. So used the phone, got Leamis, and received permission to inspect the back file.
The wind had eased up some, but the cold hadn’t, and it pinched my nose. In the Globe building the prees had started; there was vibration on the ground floor, and even more on the second, where I was taken to a dim and dusty room and turned over to an old geezer with no teeth, or anyway not enough. He warned me to do no clipping or tearing and led me to a bank of shelves marked 1959.
The light was bad, but I have good eyes. I started at August 7, a week before the date Drucker had named, to see if there was any mention of a Harvard man’s arrival or presence in town, but there wasn’t. On the fifteenth, there it was, front page. His name was Richard Ault and his home town was Evansville, Indiana. It was front page again on Sunday the sixteenth, but on Monday it was inside and on Tuesday there was nothing. I went on and finished the week but drew blanks, then went back to the first three days and read them again.
There was no hint anywhere of any covering up. The three eyewitnesses had been interviewed, and there were no discrepancies or contradictions. The porch was in plain view from the sidewalk; the two women had seen him with the gun in his hand before he had raised it, and one of them had yelled at him. The man had run across the street and had got to the porch as Mrs. Brooke and Susan emerged from the house. Susan had refused to be interviewed that evening, but had told her story to a reporter Saturday morning and had answered his questions freely.
Even if I had been hell-bent on getting something on her I would have had to cross that off and look elsewhere. I put the papers back where they belonged, told the guardian I had done no clipping or tearing, returned to the hotel, treated myself to a glass of milk in the coffee shop, and went up to bed.
I don’t know whether I would have looked any further in Racine or not if there had been no interruption. Probably not, since I had learned what was in her mind when she said “then something happened,” and that was what had sent me. The interruption woke me up Tuesday morning. I had left a call for eight o’clock, and when the phone rang I didn’t believe it and looked at my watch. Ten after seven. I thought, Damn hotels anyway, reached for the phone, and was told I was being called from New York. I said here I am, and was figuring that in New York it was ten after eight, when Wolfe’s voice came.
“Archie?”
“Right. Good morning.”
“It isn’t. Where are you?”
“In bed.”
“I do not apologize for disturbing you. Get up and come home. Miss Brooke is dead. Her body was found last evening with the skull battered. She was murdered. Come home.”
I swallowed with nothing to swallow. I started, “Where was-” and stopped. I swallowed again. “I’ll leave-”
“When will you get here?”
“How do I know? Noon, one o’
clock.”
“Very well.” He hung up.
I permitted myself to sit on the edge of the bed for ten seconds. Then I got erect, dressed, packed the bag, took the elevator down and checked out, walked to the parking lot and got the car, and headed for Chicago. I would get breakfast at the airport.
4
It wasn’t noon, and it wasn’t one o’clock, when I used my key on the door of the old brownstone on West 35th Street. It was five minutes to two. The plane had floated around above a fog bank for half an hour before landing at Idlewild-A mean Kennedy International Airport. I put my bag down and was taking my coat off when Fritz appeared at the end of the hall, from the kitchen, and came.
“Grace a Dieu,” he said. “He called the airport. You know how he is about machines. I’ve kept it hot. Shad roe fines herbes, no parsley.”
“I can use it. But I-”
A roar came. “Archie!”
I went to the open door to the dining room, which is across the hall from the office. At the table, Wolfe was putting cheese on a wafer. “Nice day,” I said. “You don’t want to smell the herbs again so I’ll eat in the kitchen with the Times. The one on the plane was the early edition.”
We get two copies of the Times, one for Wolfe, who has a tray breakfast in his room, and one for me. I proceeded to the kitchen, and there was my Times, propped on the rack, on the little table where I always eat breakfast. Even when I’m away for a week on some errand Fritz probably puts it there every morning. He would. I sat and got it and looked for the headline, but in a moment was interrupted by Fritz with the platter and a hot plate. I helped myself and took a bite of the roe and a piece of crusty roll dabbed in the sauce, which is one of Fritz’s best when he leaves the parsley out.
The details were about as scanty as in the early edition. Susan Brooke’s corpse had been found shortly before nine o’clock Monday evening in a room on the third floor of a building on 128th Street, a walk-up of course, by a man named Dunbar Whipple, who was on the staff of the Rights of Citizens Committee. Her skull had been crushed by repeated blows. I already knew that much. Also I already knew what the late city edition added: that Susan Brooke had been a volunteer worker for the ROCC, and she had lived with her widowed mother in a Park Avenue apartment; and that Dunbar Whipple was twenty-three years old and was the son of Paul Whipple, an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University. One thing I had not actually known but could have guessed if I had put my mind on it: the police and the district attorney’s office had started an investigation.
When the roe and sauce and rolls were where they belonged, and some salad, I refilled my coffee cup and took it to the office. Wolfe was at his desk, tapping his nose with a pencil, scowling at a crossword puzzle. I went to my desk, sat, and sipped coffee. After a while he switched the scowl to me, realized I hadn’t earned it, and erased it.
“Confound it,” he said, “it’s preposterous and insulting that I might lose your services and talents merely through the whim of a mechanism. How high up were you at noon?”
“Oh, four miles. I know. You regard anything and everything beyond your control as an insult. You-”
“No. Not in nature. Only in what men contrive.”
I nodded. “And what they do. For instance, committing murder. Have you any news besides what’s in the Times?”
“No.”
“Any callers? Whipple?”
“No.”
“Do you want a report on Racine?”
“No. To what purpose?”
“I merely ask. I need a shave. Since there’s nothing urgent, apparently, I’ll go up and use a mechanism. If I did report I wouldn’t have to speak ill of the dead.” I left the chair. “At least I won’t-”
The doorbell rang. I went to the hall for a look through the one-way glass, saw two men on the stoop, and stepped back in. “Two Whipples, father and son. I have never seen the son, but of course it is. Have they an appointment?”
He glared. I stood, but evidently he thought the glare needed no help, so I went down the hail to the front and opened the door. Paul Whipple said, “We have to see Mr. Wolfe. This is my son Dunbar.”
“He’s expecting you,” I said, which was probably true, and sidestepped to give them room.
A day or two earlier I would have been glad to meet the Negro specimen that Susan Brooke intended to marry, just to size him up. All right, I was meeting him, and he looked like Sugar Ray Robinson after a hard ten rounds, except that he was a little darker. A day or two earlier he would probably have been handsome and jaunty; now he was a wreck. So was his father. When I started a hand for his hat he let go before I reached it, and it dropped to the floor.
In the office I nodded the father to the red leather chair and moved up one of the yellow ones for the son. Dunbar sat, but Whipple stood and looked at Wolfe, bleary-eyed. Wolfe spoke. “Sit down, Mr. Whipple. You’re crushed. Have you eaten?”
That wasn’t flip. Wolfe is convinced that when real trouble comes the first thing to do is eat.
Dunbar blurted at Wolfe, “What did you do? What did you do?”
Whipple shook his head at him. “Take it easy, son.” He twisted around to look at the chair, saw it there, and sat. He looked at Wolfe. “You know what happened.”
Wolfe nodded. “I have read the paper. Mr. Whipple. Many people in distress have sat in that chair. Sometimes I cannot supply advice or services, but I can always supply food. I doubt if you have eaten. Have you?”
“We’re not here to eat!” Dunbar blurted. “What did you do?”
“I’ll talk, son,” Whipple told him. To Wolfe: “I know what you mean. I made him eat a little just now, on the way here. I felt I had to tell him what I asked you to do, and he wants to know what you said. You understand that he’s-uh-overwrought. As you said, in distress. Of course I would like to know too, what you did. You understand that.”
“Yes. I myself have done nothing.” Wolfe leaned back, drew in air through his nose, all there was room for, which was plenty, and let it out through his mouth. “Archie. Tell them.”
Dunbar blurted at me, “You’re Archie Goodwin.”
“Right.” I moved my eyes to Whipple. “Did you tell him exactly what you asked Mr. Wolfe to do?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Okay. A friend of mine named Lily Rowan invited Miss Brooke to lunch, and I was there. At lunch nothing was discussed but the ROCC. After lunch Miss Rowan gave Miss Brooke a check for a thousand dollars for the ROOC and asked her some questions about herself. Nothing cheeky, just the usual line. Miss Brooke mentioned that she had worked for the Parthenon Press and at the UN, and I spent three days checking that, mostly at the UN. I found nothing that you could use, and yesterday I took a plane to Chicago and drove to Racine, Wisconsin. At Racine I talked with two men who had known Miss Brooke and her family, a newspaperman and a private detective, and got no hint of anything you could use. You wanted to find out what was wrong with her. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“I decided that there was nothing worth mentioning wrong with her and never had been. When I turned in at the hotel last night I intended to leave this morning, and at seven a.m. Mr. Wolfe phoned and told me what had happened, and I left right away and returned to New York. Any questions?”
Dunbar moved. On his feet, peering down at me, his shoulders hunched, he looked like Sugar Ray starting the tenth round, not ending it. “You’re lying,” he said, not blurting. “You’re covering up, I don’t know what, but I’m going to. You know who killed her.” He wheeled to Wolfe. “So do you, you fat ape.”
“Sit down,” Wolfe said.
Dunbar put his fists on Wolfe’s desk and leaned over at him. “And you’re going to tell me,” he said through his teeth.
Wolfe shook his head. “You’re driveling, Mr. Whipple. I don’t know what you’re like when you are in command of your faculties, but I know what you’re like now. You’re an ass. Neither Mr. Goodwin nor I had ever heard of you or Miss Brooke.
I don’t suppose you suspect your father of hiring me to arrange for her death, and I doubt if-”
“That’s not-”
“I’m talking. I doubt if even in your present condition you suspect Mr. Goodwin or me of doing it unbidden. But you may-”
“I didn’t-”
“I’m talking! You may understandably surmise that in his contacts with various persons Mr. Goodwin unwittingly said or did something which led to a situation that resulted in the death of Miss Brooke. You may even surmise that he was aware of it, or is. In that case, I suggest that you sit down and ask him, civilly. He is fairly headstrong and can’t be bullied. I stopped trying years ago. As for me, I know nothing. Mr. Goodwin’s plane was late, he arrived only an hour ago, and we haven’t discussed it.”
Dunbar backed away, came in contact with the rim of the chair seat, bent his knees, and sat. His head went down and his hands came up to cover his face.
Whipple said, “Take it easy, son.”
I cleared my throat. “I have had a lot of practice reporting conversations verbatim. Also tones and looks and reactions. I am better at it than anyone around except a man named Saul Panzer. I don’t believe that anything I have said or done had any thing to do with the death of Susan Brooke, but if Mr. Wolfe tells me to-I was and am working for him-I’ll be glad to report it in full. I think it would be a waste of time. As for my covering up, nuts.”
Whipple’s jaw was working. “I hope you’re right, Mr. Goodwin. God knows I do. If I was responsible-” He couldn’t finish it.
Dunbar’s head came up, his face to me. “I’ll apologize.”
“You don’t have to. Skip it.”
“But maybe you’ll tell me who you saw and what was said. Later. I know I’m not in command of my faculties, I haven’t got any faculties. I’ve had no sleep and I don’t want to sleep. I answered questions all night and all morning. They think I killed her. By God, they think I killed her!”
I nodded. “But you didn’t?”
He stared. His eyes were in no condition for staring. “My God, do you think I did?”