by Rex Stout
She wasn’t as chipper as she had been in her office; the hazel eyes weren’t so lively. Mrs. Bruner had said that she had just talked; perhaps, sent to tell Nero Wolfe about it, she was feeling that she had just talked too much. She said yes, Mrs. Bruner had told her.
Wolfe blinked at her. The light there wasn’t like the office, and besides, his eyes had had a hard day. “My interest is centered on Morris Althaus,” he said. “Did you know him well?”
She shook her head. “Not really, no.”
“You lived under the same roof.”
“Well … that doesn’t mean anything in New York, you know that. I moved there about a year ago, and when we met in the hall one day we realized we had met before—at Mrs. Bruner’s office, the day he was there with that man, Odell. After that we had dinner together sometimes—maybe twice a month.”
“It didn’t progress to intimacy.”
“No. No matter how you define ‘intimacy.’ We weren’t intimate.”
“Then that’s settled and we can get to the point. The evening of Friday, November twentieth. Did you dine with Mr. Althaus that evening?”
“No.”
“But you were out?”
“Yes, I went to a lecture at the New School.”
“Alone?”
She smiled. “You’re like Mr. Goodwin, you want to prove you’re a detective. Yes, I was alone. The lecture was on photography. I’m interested in photography.”
“What time did you get back to your apartment?”
“A little before eleven o’clock. About ten minutes to eleven. I was going to listen to the eleven-o’clock news.”
“And then? Be as precise as possible.”
“There isn’t much to be precise about. I went in and went upstairs—it’s one flight—and into my apartment. I took my coat off and got a drink of water, and I was starting to undress when I heard footsteps out on the stairs. It sounded as if they were trying to be quiet, and I was curious. There are only four floors, and the woman on the top floor was away—she had gone to Florida. I went to the window and opened it enough to put my head out, and three men came out and turned left, and they turned at the corner, walking fast.” She gestured. “That was all.”
“Did they, one or more of them, hear you open the window and look up?”
“No. I had the window open before they came out.”
“Did they speak?”
“No.”
“Did you recognize them? Any of them?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Not necessarily ‘of course.’ But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Could you identify them?”
“No. I didn’t see their faces.”
“Did you notice any peculiarities—size, manner of walking?”
“Well … no.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“So you went to bed.”
“Yes.”
“After you entered your apartment, before you heard footsteps on the stairs, did you hear any sound above you, in Mr. Althaus’s apartment?”
“I didn’t notice any. I was moving around, taking my coat off and putting it away, and the water was running, getting it cold enough to drink. And his room had a thick carpet.”
“You had been in it?”
She nodded. “A few times. Three or four times. For a drink before we went to dinner.” She picked up her cup, and her hand was steady. I said her coffee was cold and offered to pour her some hot, but she said it was all right and drank. Wolfe poured himself some and took a sip.
“When and how,” he asked her, “did you learn that Mr. Althaus had been killed?”
“In the morning. I don’t work on Saturday and I sleep late. Irene, the cleaning woman, came and banged on my door. It was after nine o’clock.”
“Then it was you who phoned the police?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them of seeing the three men leave the house?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them that you thought they were FBI men?”
“No. That hadn’t—it was—I guess I was in shock. I had never seen a dead body before—except in a coffin.”
“When did you tell Mrs. Bruner that you thought they were FBI men?”
Her lips moved, a moment of hesitation. “On Monday.”
“Why did you think they were FBI men?”
“They looked like it. They looked young, and—well sort of athletic, and the way they walked.”
“You said there were no peculiarities.”
“I know I did. It wasn’t—I wouldn’t call it peculiarities.” She bit her lip. “I knew you would ask me this. I think I ought to admit—I think the main reason I told her that was because I knew how she felt about the FBI, I had heard her talking about that book, and I thought she would like—I mean, that would agree with how she felt about them. I don’t like to admit this, Mr. Wolfe, of course I don’t. I know how it sounds. I hope you won’t tell Mrs. Bruner.”
“I’ll tell her only if it suits a purpose.” Wolfe picked up his cup, drank, put the cup down, and looked at me. “Archie?”
“Maybe one or two little points.” I looked at her, and she looked back. The hazel eyes seemed darker when they were straight on you. “Of course,” I said, “the cops have asked you about the last time you spoke with Althaus. When was it?”
“Three days before—before that Friday. Tuesday morning, in the hall, just a minute or two. Just by accident.”
“Did he tell you he was doing a piece on the FBI?”
“No. He never talked to me about his work.”
“When was the last time you were with him—for dinner, for anything?”
“I’m not sure about the date. It was about a month before, some day in October. We had dinner together.”
“At a restaurant?”
“Yes. Jerry’s Joint.”
“Have you ever met Miss Marian Hinckley?”
“Hinckley? No.”
“Or a man named Vincent Yarmack?”
“No.”
“Or one named Timothy Quayle?”
“No.”
“Did Althaus ever mention any of those names?”
“Not that I remember. He might have mentioned them.”
I raised my brows at Wolfe. He regarded her for half a minute, grunted, and told her he doubted if she had supplied anything that would help, so the evening had probably been wasted. As he spoke I went and got her coat, and held it for her when she got up. Wolfe didn’t leave his chair. He does sometimes rise when a woman comes or goes; he probably has some kind of a rule for it, but I have never been able to figure it out. She said I needn’t bother to see her downstairs, but, wishing to show her that some private detectives have some manners, I went along. Down on the sidewalk, as the doorman waved a taxi up, she put her hand on my arm and said she would be so grateful if we didn’t tell Mrs. Bruner, and I patted her shoulder. Patting a shoulder can be anything from an apology to a promise, and only the patter can say which.
When I got back to the room upstairs Wolfe was still in the armchair, with his fingers clasped at the peak of his middle mound. When I turned from shutting the door he growled, “Does she lie?”
I said certainly and went and sat.
“How the devil can you tell?”
“All right,” I said, “to skip argument I’ll concede that I am wise to attractive young women and you are not, since that’s your line. But even you must know that she is not a big enough sap to give Mrs. Bruner that guff about FBI men just because she thought she would like to hear it. I doubt if she’s a sap at all. But she did tell Mrs. Bruner that, so she had a reason, and not just some bull about how they walked. She had a real reason, God knows what. One guess out of a dozen: When she went in the house she heard noises, and went up another flight and listened at Althaus’s door, and heard something they said. I don’t like it, because if it was something like that why didn’t she tell the cops? I pre
fer something she wouldn’t want to spill. For instance, she knew Althaus was working on the FBI. He had—”
“How did she know?”
“Oh, it had progressed to intimacy. That’s the easiest lie a woman can tell, they’ve been telling that one for ten thousand years. Very convenient, there in the same house, and he liked women and she is no hag. He had told her. He had even told her they might call on him uninvited when he wasn’t home. So she—”
“She would have gone up to see if he was there.”
“She did, after she saw the three men leaving, but the door was locked and she had no key, and her knock or ring wasn’t answered. Anyway, I am only answering your question does she lie. She does.”
“Then we need the truth. Get it.”
That was par. He does not believe that I can take a girl to the Flamingo and dance a couple of hours and end up with all her deepest secrets, but he pretends he does because he thinks it makes me try harder.
“I’ll consider it,” I said. “I’ll sleep on it—on the couch. May I change the subject? Last night you asked me if I could contrive any maneuver that would help to make Wragg believe that one of his men killed Althaus, and I said I couldn’t. But I have. They have an open tail on Sarah Dacos, so they know she was here, and almost certainly they know you are. Also they know she lives at Sixty-three Arbor Street, and they do not know what she saw or heard that night. Therefore they don’t know what she might have told you here tonight, but they’ll assume it was something about that night. That should help.”
“Possibly. Satisfactory.”
“Yeah. But. If we take a taxi, now, to Cramer’s home and spend an hour with him, they will absolutely assume that we have got something hot regarding his unsolved homicide, and that we got it from Sarah Dacos. That would help.”
He shook his head. “You gave Mr. Cramer our word of honor.”
“Only about his seeing me and telling me. We go to him because in trying to dig up something on the FBI we got interested in Morris Althaus because he was working on them, and he was murdered, and Sarah Dacos tells us something about the murder that we think Cramer should know. Our word of honor is good as gold.”
“What time is it?”
I looked. “Three minutes to ten.”
“Mr. Cramer would be in bed, and we have nothing for him.”
“The hell we haven’t. We have someone who had some reason for thinking they were G-men and is saving it. That will be pie for Cramer.”
“No. It’s our pie. We’ll give Mr. Cramer Miss Dacos only when we have her ourselves, if at all.” He pushed his chair back. “Get it out of her. Tomorrow. I’m tired. We’re going home and to bed.”
Chapter 10
At 10:35 Saturday morning I used a key on the door of 63 Arbor Street, ascended two flights of wooden stairs, used another key, and entered the apartment that had been Morris Althaus’s.
I was following my own approach to the problem of getting it out of Sarah Dacos. I admit it was roundabout, especially in view of the fact that time was short, but it was a better stab at getting results than persuading her to go to the Flamingo for an evening of dancing. The fact that time was short had been made publicly evident by an item on the twenty-eighth page of the morning paper, which I had read at my breakfast table in the kitchen. It was headlined FINGERS CROSSED? and said:
The members of the Ten for Aristology, one of the most exclusive of New York’s gourmet groups, evidently do not believe that history repeats itself. Lewis Hewitt, capitalist, socialite, orchid fancier, and aristologist, will entertain the group at dinner at his home at North Cove, Long Island, on Thursday evening, January 14. The menu will be chosen by Nero Wolfe, the well-known private investigator, and the food will be prepared by Fritz Brenner, Mr. Wolfe’s chef. Mr. Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, his confidential assistant, will be present as guests.
That arrangement arouses memory of another occasion when Mr. Brenner cooked a dinner for the Ten for Aristology, and Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Goodwin were guests, at the home of Benjamin Schriver, the shipping magnate. It occurred on April 1, 1958, and one of the Ten, Vincent Pyle, head of a Wall Street brokerage firm, was poisoned with arsenic in his portion of the first course, served to him by Carol Annis, who was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder.
Yesterday a Times reporter, remembering that former occasion, telephoned Mr. Hewitt and asked him if any of the Ten for Aristology (aristology means science of dining) had shown any reluctance to attend the affair next Thursday, and Mr. Hewitt said no. When the reporter asked him if he would keep his fingers crossed he said, “How can I? I couldn’t handle my knife and fork.”
It will certainly be an excellent meal.
Setting the date definitely, Thursday the fourteenth, was the detail I had been hottest about when discussing it with Wolfe Thursday night. I said it should be left open, that the item in the paper could say something like “some evening this month.” Wolfe said that Hewitt, when phoning his fellow aristologists, would have to name a date. I said he could tell them it would have to be indefinite because it would depend on when Fritz could get something shipped by air from France. Gourmets love things shipped by air from France. But Wolfe had insisted, and now we were stuck with it, only five days to go.
So I hadn’t liked the roundabout approach to Sarah Dacos, but it was obviously the best bet, and right after breakfast I had phoned Mrs. Althaus to ask if she could give me ten minutes. She had said yes, and I had gone, of course ignoring the tail problem. The more they saw me working the Althaus angle, the better. I told her there had been some developments which we would tell her about when we had figured them out, and it might help if she would let me take a look at everything that had been in her son’s apartment, at least what was left of it. She said everything was left. The lease had nearly a year to go, and they hadn’t tried to sublet. They hadn’t removed anything, and as far as she knew the police hadn’t either; they hadn’t asked for permission to. I promised to take nothing without her permission if she would let me go and have a look, and she went and got the keys without phoning the lawyer or even her husband. Perhaps I appeal more to middle-aged women than to young ones, but don’t try to tell Wolfe that.
So at 10:35 Saturday morning I entered the apartment of the late Morris Althaus, shut the door, and sent my eyes around. It wasn’t bad at all if you ignored the pictures. As Sarah Dacos had said, the wall-to-wall carpet was thick. There was a big couch with a coffee table in front of it, a good sitting chair near a lamp, four other chairs, a small table with a metal object on it that might have been created by some kid handy with tools out of junk stuff he found in the garage, a large desk with nothing much on it besides a telephone, and a typewriter on a stand. Most of one wall had bookshelves, full, nearly to the ceiling. The less said about the pictures on the other walls the better. They would have been fine for a guessing game—have a party and everybody guesses what they are—if you could find someone who knew the answers.
I put my hat and coat on the couch and toured. Two closets in the living room. There was a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a bedroom with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a dresser, two chairs, and a closet full of clothes. On the dresser were framed photographs of his father and mother, so he hadn’t resigned from the family, only from Peggy Pilgrim. I returned to the living room and started looking. With the tan drapes drawn it was dim, and I turned the lights on. The dust was thick on everything, but I was there legally and properly, so I didn’t bother to put gloves on.
Of course I didn’t expect to find anything obvious, pointing straight at anyone or anything in particular, since the cops had been through it, but they had had no one specifically in mind, and I did have: Sarah Dacos. No doubt you would like very much to have a complete inventory of everything in the place, especially the contents of the drawers and closets, but it would take too much space. I mention only one item, the 384 pages of the unfinished novel. I read a page and a half of it. To read it through to see if there was a g
irl in it who reminded me of Sarah Dacos would have taken all day.
The only other item I mention was in the bottom drawer of the chest in the bedroom. Along with a lot of other miscellaneous articles there were a dozen or so photographs. There was none of Sarah Dacos, but there was one of Althaus, lying on his side on the couch in the living room, with nothing on but his skin. I hadn’t seen him naked before, since in the pictures of him in the Gazette file he had been decent. He had been in pretty good shape, muscles visible and belly flat, but the back of the photograph was more interesting than the front.
Someone had written a poem on it, or part of one. I have since been allowed to reproduce it, so I can show it here:
Bold Lover, ever, ever shalt thou kiss,
And win the willing goal, and never leave;
She will not fear, and thou shalt have thy bliss.
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
I haven’t read all the poetry in the world, but Lily Rowan has a shelf of it and on certain occasions wants me to read some aloud to her, and I was pretty sure I had read that, but there was something wrong with it. I tried to place it but couldn’t. Anyway, the point was, who had written it? Not Althaus; I had seen his hand on various items. Sarah Dacos? If so, I had something. I had plenty. I put it on top of the chest and spent another hour looking, but drew a blank.
I had promised Mrs. Althaus I would take nothing without her permission, but I was tempted. I could take the photograph, not out of the house, but just one flight down, knock at Sarah Dacos’s door, and if she was there, as she might be on a Saturday, display it and ask her, “Did you write that?” It was a real temptation, so quick and direct. But it was too damned direct. I would have to stick to the roundabout. I left the apartment and the house, found a phone booth, dialed Mrs. Bruner’s number and got her, and told her I wanted to come and ask her something. She said she would be there until one o’clock. It was only twenty past twelve. I went out and got a taxi.