by Rex Stout
She was in her office, at her desk with some papers, expecting me. She asked if Miss Dacos had come as arranged, saying she had rather expected her to phone, but she hadn’t. I said yes, she had come, and had been very cooperative. I emphasized the “very,” since it was possible that the room was bugged. Then I sat, leaned forward to her, and whispered, “Do you mind if we whisper?”
She frowned. “It is so ridiculous!”
“Yes,” I whispered, “but it’s safe. You don’t need to say much. I only want a sample of Miss Dacos’s handwriting. Anything—a memo, a note to you. I know this seems even more ridiculous, but it isn’t. Don’t ask me to explain because I can’t. I’m following instructions. Either you trust Mr. Wolfe to do the job and do it right or you don’t.”
“But why on earth—” she began, but I showed her a palm.
“If you don’t want to whisper,” I whispered, “just give me what I asked for and I’ll go.”
When I left the house five minutes later, with two samples of Sarah Dacos’s hand in my pocket—a nine-word entry on a sheet from a desk calendar and a six-line memo to Mrs. Bruner—I was feeling that middle-aged women are the backbone of the country. She hadn’t whispered a word. She had fished in a drawer and got the memo and torn the sheet from the calendar, handed them to me, said, a little louder than usual. “Let me know when there is something I should know,” and picked up one of the papers. What a client.
In the taxi back downtown I inspected the samples, and I was already ninety-percent sure when I mounted the two flights at 63 Arbor Street. I went to the bedroom for the photograph, got comfortable in the good sitting chair under the lamp in the living room, and compared. I am not a handwriting expert, but it didn’t need one. The person who had written the samples had written the poetry on the back of the photograph. Probably she had also taken the photograph, but that didn’t matter. I formed a conclusion. I concluded that Sarah Dacos’s memory had failed her when she said that it had not progressed to intimacy.
The immediate question was, should I phone Mrs. Althaus for permission to take the photograph, or should I leave it? I decided that leaving it would be too risky; Sarah might get in somehow and find it and take it. I got a sheet of typewriter paper from the desk and folded it, and inserted the photograph. It was almost too wide for my breast pocket, but I eased it in. I looked around a little, from habit, to be sure things were as I had found them, and left with my loot. As I passed the door of Sarah Dacos’s apartment on the way down I threw it a kiss. Then it occurred to me that it rated more than a kiss, and I went and took a look at the lock. It was the same make as the one on Althaus’s door, a Bermatt, nothing special.
At the same booth where I had phoned Mrs. Bruner I rang Mrs. Althaus’s number, got her, told her I had left everything in order in the apartment, and asked if she wanted the keys returned immediately. She said at my convenience, no hurry.
“By the way,” I said, “I’m taking one item, if you don’t mind—a photograph of a man that was in a drawer. I want to see if someone recognizes it. All right?”
She said I was very mysterious, but yes, I could take it. I would have liked to tell her what I thought of middle-aged women but decided we weren’t intimate enough. I dialed another number, told the woman who answered, whose name was Mimi, that I would like to speak to Miss Rowan, and in a moment the familiar voice came.
“Lunch in ten minutes. Come and get it.”
“You’re too young for me. I’ve decided women under fifty are—what are they?”
“Well, jejune’s a good word.”
“Too many Js. I’ll think of one and tell you this evening. Two things. One, I have to be home at midnight. I’m sleeping in the office and—I’ll explain when I see you.”
“Good Lord, has he rented your room?”
“As a matter of fact, he has, for one night. I won’t explain that. Hold it a second.” I transferred the receiver to my right hand and used the left to slip the photograph from my pocket. “Here’s some poetry. Listen.” I read it, with feeling. “Do you recognize it?”
“Certainly. So do you.”
“No I don’t, but it seems familiar.”
“It should. Where did you get it?”
“I’ll tell you someday. What is it?”
“It’s a take-off of the last four lines of the second stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ It’s sort of clever, but no one should monkey with Keats. Escamillo, you’re a pretty good detective and you dance like an angel, and you have other outstanding qualities, but you will never be a highbrow. Come and read Keats to me.”
I told her she was too jejune, hung up, slipped the photograph back in my pocket, and went out and took my fifth taxi in five hours. The client could afford it.
It was five minutes to two when I put my hat and coat on the rack in the hall, went to the door of the dining room, told Wolfe, who was at the table, that it looked and felt like snow, and proceeded to the kitchen. I don’t join Wolfe when I arrive in the middle of a meal; we agree that for one man to hurry with meat or fish while the other dawdles with pastry or cheese is bad for the atmosphere. Fritz put things on my breakfast table and brought what was left of the baked bluefish, and I asked him how he was getting on with the menu for next Thursday’s blowout.
“I’m not discussing that,” he said. “I am not discussing anything, Archie. He was in my room for more than an hour before lunch, talking with the television on loud. If it is so dangerous I will not talk at all.”
I told him we should be back to normal by the time the shad roe started coming, and he threw up his hands and said good God in French.
When I finished and went to the office Wolfe was standing over by the globe, turning it and scowling at it. The man who gave him that globe, the biggest one I have ever seen, couldn’t have known what a big help it would be. Whenever a situation gets so ticklish that he wishes he were somewhere else, he can walk over to the globe and pick spots to go to. Wonderful. As I entered he asked if I had anything, and when I nodded he went to his desk and I turned on the radio, took a yellow chair around near his elbow, and reported. It didn’t take long, since there had been no conversation to speak of, just the action. I didn’t mention the phone call to Lily Rowan because it had been purely personal.
Having read the poetry twice, he handed the photograph back to me and said she had an ear for meter.
“I told you she wasn’t a sap.” I said. “Pretty neat, doing that with the last four lines of the second stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’“
His eyes narrowed at me. “How the deuce do you know that? You don’t read Keats.”
I shrugged. “Back in Ohio in my boyhood days. As you know, I have quite a memory. I don’t brag about that, but I have a brag coming about this.” I tapped the photograph. “We know why she lied. She’s involved. Possibly not too deep; it could be that she merely didn’t want to admit she was close with him, close enough for him to tell her about the FBI. Or possibly very deep. ‘Ever, ever shalt thou kiss.’ And ‘Forever wilt thou love.’ But he told her he was going to marry another girl, so she shot him, probably with his own gun. The second alternative, which we prefer by far. It would be hard to nail her. She might be able to prove she was at that lecture but not what time she left. Possibly she wasn’t there at all. She spent the evening at Sixty-three Arbor Street, having it out with the bold lover, and she shot him before the G-men arrived. Does that appeal to you?”
“As conjecture, yes.”
“Then I should look into the lecture question. She might have a tight alibi. According to Cramer, the G-men left about eleven o’clock, and of course they had combed the place, whether they killed him or not; they got the material he had gathered. So they arrived not later than ten-thirty, or even make it ten-forty. If she shot him she was out before they came. The New School is on Twelfth Street. If anyone saw her at the lecture as late as ten-twenty, or even a quarter past, she’s clear. I’ll start asking.”
&n
bsp; “No.”
“No?”
“No. If they learned you were doing that, either by surveillance of you or through inadvertence, they would know we were seriously considering the possibility that that woman killed him, and that would be disastrous. We must maintain the illusion that we are convinced that a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Morris Althaus and that we are procuring evidence to establish it; otherwise our preparations for next Thursday evening will come to nothing. For protection of our flank we needed to know definitely if Miss Dacos was lying, and you have settled that: she was. Satisfactory. She lied to conceal the fact that she had compromised herself, and that satisfies us. Whether the involvement was merely a secret intimacy she doesn’t want revealed, or was murder by her hand, is of no importance to us.”
“Cramer would love to know that. After giving us the steer. I’ll call him and tell him, to relieve his mind.”
“Pfui. When we have relieved our minds by finishing the job we were hired to do we’ll consider our obligation to him. If it seems feasible without excessive effort we’ll owe him no apology.”
“Then we forget the murder until after Thursday.”
“Yes.”
“That’s just dandy. Agencies are closed today and tomorrow, so Hewitt can’t start looking until Monday. I’ll be at the Flamingo this evening if anything happens; for instance, if Hewitt calls to say he has decided that it’s too much trouble and we have to find someone else. Tomorrow Miss Rowan is having a crowd in for Sunday lunch and dancing and I’ll stay afterwards to help empty ashtrays. Any instructions for this afternoon?”
“Turn off the radio,” he growled.
Chapter 11
It bothered me for four days and four nights, from Saturday afternoon, when Wolfe said we would forget the murder, to Wednesday morning, when I did something about it on my own.
There were two aspects. First, if the conjecture about Sarah Dacos, or something like it, was actually a fact, I had removed evidence from the scene of a murder and was withholding it. Of course the cops had had their whack at it, they had certainly seen the photograph and had left it there, and Mrs. Althaus had given me the keys, but that was only a legal out. It was the second aspect that really bothered me. Cramer had saved our licenses for us, at least so far, and it was me, Archie Goodwin, he had invited to a conference and bought a carton of milk for and turned loose on a homicide. I have no objection to playing games with cops, sometimes you want to, but this was different. I owed Cramer something personally.
So it bothered me, but something else was bothering me still more, the act Wolfe was staging, the fanciest on record. Too much of it, nearly all of it, was entirely out of our control. For instance, when I called Hewitt from a booth Monday evening to ask how he had made out, and he said fine, he had got one actor at one agency and the other at another, and they would both come to his place Tuesday afternoon, and I asked if he had made sure that the one for me could drive a car and had a license, he had forgotten to ask, but everyone could drive a car! And that was absolutely vital and he knew it. He said he would find out right away; he had the actor’s phone number. On some other details he was okay, like his phone call to our number Tuesday noon, as arranged. He told Wolfe he was extremely sorry, he apologized, but he would be able to include only twelve Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in the shipment instead of twenty, and no Oncidium flexuosum at all. He said he would do his best to get it off by noon Wednesday, so it should arrive by two o’clock. He handled that perfectly. He was also okay on the call he made Tuesday evening to report on the supplies and arrangements for the dinner for the Ten for Aristology, but for him that was just routine, and anyway it was straight.
Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather were no worry because they had been left to Saul to handle, and if there was any snag he would let us know. How was up to him.
Off and on all day and evening Monday, and even some on Tuesday, Wolfe and I discussed a problem. It wasn’t an argument; we just discussed it. Should I phone Wragg, the special agent in charge, arrange to meet him somewhere, tell him that Wolfe had got enough dope on the Althaus homicide to make it really tough and I wanted out, and offer to pass everything we had over to him for ten grand or twenty grand or fifty grand? The trouble was we didn’t know him. It might make it next to certain that he would take the bait, but it might do just the opposite, make him smell a rat. Finally, late Tuesday morning, we crossed it off. It was too chancy, and time was too short.
At nine o’clock Wednesday morning, when I heard the elevator taking Wolfe up to the plant rooms, I took my second cup of breakfast coffee to the office, to sit and look at an idea that had been pecking at me off and on since Monday morning. There would be nothing for me until the truckload of orchids arrived at two o’clock, everything had been done that could be done as far as I knew, which wasn’t very far. When I finished the coffee it was only nine-twenty, and Sarah Dacos probably didn’t start the day at the Bruner office until nine-thirty or even ten. I went to the cabinet, unlocked the drawer where we keep assortments of keys, and made some selections. It wasn’t complicated, since I knew the lock was a Bermatt. From another drawer I got a pair of rubber gloves.
At 9:35 I dialed the Bruner number, and it was answered. “Mrs. Bruner’s office, good morning.”
“Good morning. Miss Dacos?”
“Yes.”
“This is Archie Goodwin. I may need to see Mrs. Bruner later today, and I’m calling to ask if she’ll be available.”
She said it depended on how late, Mrs. Bruner expected to be in the office from three-thirty to five-thirty, and I said I would call again if I needed to come.
So she was at her job. I would have to take a chance on the cleaning woman. I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was going out to make some phone calls, to the hall for my hat and coat, and out and to Ninth Avenue for a taxi.
For the street door at 63 Arbor Street I still had the key Mrs. Althaus had given me, so I was clean until I stood at Sarah Dacos’s door and got out the collection of keys. When I had knocked twice, and pushed the button twice and heard the ring, with no response, I tried a key. The fourth one did it, smooth and easy. I put the gloves on, turned the knob, opened the door, crossed the sill, and shut the door, and I had broken and entered according to the statutes of the State of New York.
The layout was the same as upstairs, but the furniture was quite different. Rugs here and there instead of carpet, smaller couch smothered with pillows, no desk or typewriter, fewer chairs, about one-fourth as many books, five little pictures on the walls which the bold lover must have considered old hat. The drapes were drawn, and I turned the lights on, put my coat and hat on the couch, and went and opened a closet door.
There were two facts: the cleaning woman might come any minute; and I had no idea what I might find, if anything. The point was simply that there might be something that would help, no matter what was going to happen Thursday night, to square it with Cramer for that carton of milk. A fast once-over was called for, and I spent only ten minutes on the living room and its two closets and then went to the bedroom.
I came mighty close to passing it by. The bedroom closet was crammed—clothes on hangers, shoe racks, luggage, cartons and hatboxes on two high shelves. The bag and two suitcases were packed with summer clothes, and I skipped the hatboxes; I would have given a finif of my money to know if the cleaning woman came Wednesdays. But ten minutes later, going through a drawerful of photographs one by one, I realized that it was dumb to skip the hatboxes and then waste time with a bunch of photographs which could tell me nothing I didn’t already know, so I took a chair to the closet, mounted it, and got the boxes down. There were three. The first one contained three so-called hats and two bikinis. The second one held one big floppy hat. I lifted it out, and there on the bottom was a revolver. I gawked at it for five seconds, then took it out and inspected it. It was an S&W .38 and held one cartridge that had been fired and five that hadn’t.
I stood with it in
my hand. It was a hundred to one that it was the gun that Althaus had had a permit for, and it had fired the bullet that had gone through him, and Sarah Dacos had pulled the trigger. To hell with the one chance in a hundred. The question was what to do with it. If I took it, it would never be an acceptable exhibit in a murder trial, since I had got it illegally. If I left it there and went out to a phone booth and rang Cramer to tell him to get a warrant to search Sarah Dacos’s apartment, the cops would get the gun all right, but if the FBI found out about it within thirty-six hours, as they easily might, the big act for Thursday night would be kaput. And of course if I left it in the hatbox and didn’t phone Cramer, Sarah Dacos might decide that tonight would be a good time to take it and toss it in the river.
Since that left only one alternative, the only decision that had to be made was where to put it. I returned the hat to the box and the boxes to the shelf, put the chair back where it belonged, and looked around. No spot in the bedroom appealed to me, and I moved to the living room. It was now more than ever desirable not to be interrupted by a cleaning woman or anyone else. I went and examined the couch and found that underneath the cushion was a box spring, and underneath the spring was a plywood bottom. Good enough. If she got the hatbox down and found the gun gone, she certainly wouldn’t suppose it had merely been moved to another spot in the apartment and start looking. I put it on the bottom under the spring, glanced around to see that things were as I had found them, grabbed my hat and coat, and got out of there in such a hurry that I almost appeared on the sidewalk wearing rubber gloves.
In the taxi I had to answer another question: did I or didn’t I tell Wolfe? Why not wait until Thursday night had come and gone? The answer was really simple, but of course that’s one thing we use our minds for, finding complicated reasons for dodging simple answers. By the time the cab stopped in front of the old brownstone my mind had run out of reasons and I was facing the fact that it wouldn’t improve with age.