by Rex Stout
Mr. Root was not clearing up today.
“Very well. I can offer no inducement. In any event, having answered the advertisement and received a message from me, you were of course delighted, and doubly delighted when you were hired.” Wolfe’s eyes described an arc, including everybody in the roundup. “I invite comment, anything from irony to derision, on the fact that I paid a hundred dollars a day, to get him to live in my house, eat my food, and sit in my chair, to a man who had resolved to kill me. I can afford the invitation only because, in spite of that overwhelming handicap, I shall go on living and he will not.”
Nobody seemed to have any irony or derision ready, but Jensen chipped in, “You still haven’t explained the flummery.”
Wolfe nodded at him. “I’m getting to it, sir. Naturally, from the moment he got in here, Mr. Root was concocting schemes, rejecting, considering, revising; and no doubt relishing the situation enormously. The device of the handkerchief to protect a hand firing a gun was no doubt a part of one of those schemes, but it served admirably for the one he finally used. This morning he learned that Miss Geer was to call on me at six o’clock, and he was to impersonate me. After lunch, in here alone, he got a cushion from the sofa in there, wrapped his revolver in it, and fired a bullet through the back of this chair into the wall. He could, if he wished, have held the thing right against the back of the chair, and probably did. He stuffed the cushion into the rear compartment of the bottom right-hand drawer of this desk, having observed that the contents of the front of the drawer indicated that it was rarely opened. He put the gun in his pocket. He kept the chair pushed back to the wall to cover the hole in the plaster. The hole in the leather was not conspicuous and he took the risk of its being seen; when he was in the chair he covered the hole with his head.”
“If the hole had been seen the bullet would have been found,” Cramer muttered.
“I have already pronounced him,” Wolfe said testily, “an unsurpassable fool. Even so, he knew that Archie would be out with him the rest of the afternoon, and I would be in my room. I had made a remark which informed him that I would not sit in that chair again until he was permanently out of it. At six o’clock Miss Geer arrived, unexpectedly accompanied by Mr. Jensen. They were shown into the front room, and that door was open. Mr. Root’s brain moved swiftly, and so did the rest of him. He got one of my guns from Archie’s desk, returned to this chair, opened the drawer where he had put the cushion, fired a shot into the cushion, dropped the gun in, and shut the drawer.”
Wolfe sighed again. “Archie came dashing in, cast a glance at Mr. Root seated here, and went on to the front room. Mr. Root grasped the opportunity to do two things: return my gun to the drawer of Archie’s desk, and use a blade of his knife, I would guess the awl, to tear a gash in the corner of his ear. That of course improved the situation for him. But what improved it vastly more was the chance that came soon after, when Archie took him to the bathroom and left him there. He might have found another chance, but that was perfect. He entered the front room from the bathroom, put his own gun, handkerchief attached, in the vase, and returned to the bathroom, and later rejoined the others here.”
“Jesus!” Purley Stebbins said incredulously. “That guy would jump off the Empire State Building to catch an airplane by the tail.”
“No doubt,” Wolfe agreed. “I have called him a fool; and yet it was by no means utterly preposterous if I had not noticed the absence of that cushion. Since this desk sits flush with the floor, no sign of the bullet fired into the bottom drawer would be visible unless the drawer was opened, and why should it be? It was unlikely that Archie would have occasion to find that one of my guns in his desk had been fired, and what if he did? Mr. Root knows how to handle a gun without leaving fingerprints, which is simple. Confound it, no. It was entirely feasible for him to await an opportunity to kill me, this evening, tonight, tomorrow morning, with all suspicion aimed at Miss Geer and Mr. Jensen-and disappear.”
Cramer slowly nodded. “I’m not objecting. I’ll buy it. But you must admit you’ve described quite a few things you can’t prove.”
“I don’t have to. Neither do you. As I said before, Mr. Root will be put on trial for the murder of Mr. Jensen and Mr. Doyle, not for his antics here in my house. And I wish you would take him somewhere else. I’ve seen enough of him.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Cramer grinned, which was rare. He stood up. “Let’s go, Mr. Root.”
After letting them out and watching Cramer and Purley manipulating Hackett-Root down the steps to the sidewalk and into the police car, I shut the door without bothering about the bolt and returned to the office. Jane and Jensen were standing side by side in front of Wolfe’s desk, just barely not holding hands, beaming down at him.
“… more than neat,” Jensen was saying. “It was absolutely brilliant.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Jane declared. “It was wonderful.”
“It was merely a job,” Wolfe murmured, as if he knew what modesty was.
Nobody paid any attention to me. I sat down and yawned. Jensen seemed to be hesitating about something, then abruptly got it out.
“I owe you money. I came here Wednesday to engage you to investigate my father’s murder. Later, when the police got the crazy idea that I was involved in it, I was even more anxious to engage you, but still you wouldn’t see me, and now of course I understand why. I may not be in debt to you legally, but I am morally, and it will be a great satisfaction to pay it. I haven’t my checkbook with me, so I’ll have to mail you one-say, five thousand dollars?”
Wolfe shook his head. “I accept pay only from clients, as arranged in advance. If you send me a check I’ll have to return it. If you have to send one in order to sleep, send it to the National War Fund.” I managed to keep my face straight. As for Wolfe’s renunciation, his income for the year had already reached a point where out of an additional five grand he would have been able to keep about one-fifth. As for Jensen’s generosity, if it is okay for males at one age to climb trees and turn somersaults in the presence of females, why isn’t it okay for them at another age to wave checkbooks? The way Jane was looking at him reminded me of the way a fifth-grade girl looked at me once, out in Ohio, when I chinned myself fourteen times.
So they settled it on a basis of reciprocal nobility, and the pair turned to go.
Not caring to appear churlish, I went to open the front door for them. As they were passing through, Jane suddenly realized I was there and stopped and impulsively extended her hand. “I take it back, Archie. You’re not a rat. Shake on it. Is he, Emil?”
“He certainly is not,” Emil baritoned heartily.
“Gee,” I stammered with moist eyes, “this is the happiest day of my life. This will make a new rat of me.” I closed the door.
Back in the office, Wolfe, in his own chair with only one bullet hole that could easily be repaired, and with three bottles of beer on a tray in front of him, was leaning back with his hands resting on the chair arms and his eyes open only to slits, the picture of a man at peace.
He murmured at me, “Archie. Don’t forget to remind me in the morning to telephone Mr. Viscardi about that tarragon.”
“Yes, sir.” I sat down. “And if I may, sir, I would like to offer a suggestion.”
“What?”
“Only a suggestion. Let’s advertise for a man-eating tiger weighing around two hundred and sixty pounds capable of easy and normal movement. We could station him behind the big cabinet and when you enter he would lay on you from the rear.”
It didn’t faze him. He was enjoying the feel of his chair and I doubt if he heard me.
3. Instead of Evidence
I
Among the kinds of men I have a prejudice against are the ones named Eugene.
There’s no use asking me why, because I admit it’s a prejudice. It may be that when I was in kindergarten out in Ohio a man named Eugene stole candy from me, but if so I have forgotten all about it. For all pract
ical purposes, it is merely one facet of my complex character that I do not like men named Eugene.
That and that alone accounted for my [garbled] attitude when Mr. and Mrs. Eugene R. Poor called at Nero Wolfe’s office that Tuesday afternoon in October, because I had never seen or heard of the guy before, and neither had Wolfe. The appointment had been made by phone that morning, so I was prejudiced before I ever got a look at him. The look hadn’t swayed me much one way or the other. He wasn’t too old to remember what his wife had given him on his fortieth birthday, but neither was he young enough to be still looking forward to it. Nothing about him stood out. His face was taken at random out of stock, with no alterations.
Gray herringbone suits like his were that afternoon being bought in stores from San Diego to Bangor. Really his only distinction was that they had named him Eugene.
In spite of which I was regarding him with polite curiosity, for he had just told Nero Wolfe that he was going: to be murdered by a man named Conroy Blaney.
I was sitting at my desk in the room Nero Wolfe used for an office in his home on West Thirty-fifth Street, and Wolfe was behind his desk, arranged in a chair that had been specially constructed to support up to a quarter of a ton, which was not utterly beyond the limits of possibility. Eugene R. Poor was in the red leather chair a short distance beyond Wolfe’s desk, with a little table smack against its right arm for the convenience of clients in writing checks. Mrs. Poor was on a spare between her husband and me.
I might mention that I was not aware of any prejudice against Mrs. Poor. For one thing, there was no reason to suppose that her name was Eugene. For another, there were several reasons to suppose that her fortieth birthday would not come before mine, though she was good and mature. She had by no means struck me dumb, but there are people who seem to improve a room just by being in it.
Naturally Wolfe was scowling. He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation.
“No, sir,” he said emphatically. “I suppose two hundred men and women have sat in that chair, Mr. Poor, and tried to hire me to keep someone from killing them.”
His eyes twitched to me. “How many, Archie?”
I said, to oblige him, “Two hundred and nine.”
“Have I taken the jobs?”
“No, sir. Never.”
He wiggled a finger at Eugene. “For two million dollars a year you can make it fairly difficult for a man to kill you. That’s about what it costs to protect a president or a king, and even so consider the record. Of course, if you give up all other activity it can be done more cheaply, say forty thousand a year. A cave in a mountainside, never emerging, with six guards you can trust and a staff to suit-”
Eugene was trying to get something in. He finally did. “I don’t expect you to keep him from killing me. That’s not what I came for.”
“Then-what the deuce did you come for?”
“To keep him from getting away with it.” Eugene cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you. I agree that you can’t stop him, I don’t see how anybody can. Sooner or later. He’s a clever man.” His voice took on bitterness. “Too damn clever for me and I wish I’d never met him. Sure, I know a man can kill a man if he once decides to, but Con Blaney is so damn clever that it isn’t a question whether he can kill me or not, the question is whether he can manage it so that he is in the clear. I’m afraid he can. I would bet he can. And I don’t want him to.”
His wife made a little noise and he stopped to look at her. Then he shook his head at her as if she had said something, took a cigar from his vest pocket, removed the band, inspected first one end and then the other to decide which was which, got a gadget from another vest pocket and snipped one of the ends, and lit up. He no sooner had it lit than it slipped out of his mouth, bounced on his thigh, and landed on the rug. He retrieved it and got his teeth sunk in it. So, I thought to myself, you’re not so doggone calm about getting murdered as you were making out to be.
“So I came,” he told Wolfe, “to give you the facts, to get the facts down, and to pay you five thousand dollars to see that he doesn’t manage it that way.” The cigar between his teeth interfered with his talking, and he removed it. “If he kills me I’ll be dead. I want someone to know about it.”
Wolfe’s eyes had gone half shut. “But why pay me five thousand dollars in advance? Wouldn’t someone know about it? Your wife, for instance?”
Eugene nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought it all out. What if he kills her too? I have no idea how he’ll try to work it, or when, and who is there besides my wife I can absolutely trust? I’m not taking any chances. Of course I thought of the police, but judging from my own experience, a couple of burglaries down at the shop, and you know, the experiences of a businessman, I’m not sure they’d even remember I’d been there if it happened in a year or maybe two years.” He stuck his cigar in his mouth, puffed twice, and took it out again. “What’s the matter, don’t you want five thousand dollars?”
Wolfe said gruffly, “I wouldn’t get five thousand. This is October. As my nineteen forty-five income now stands, I’ll keep about ten percent of any additional receipts after paying taxes. Out of five thousand, five hundred would be mine. If Mr. Blaney is as clever as you think he is, I wouldn’t consider trying to uncover him on a murder for five hundred dollars.” He stopped and opened his eyes to glare at the wife. “May I ask, madam, what you are looking so pleased about?” Wolfe couldn’t stand to see a woman look pleased. Mrs. Poor was regarding him with a little smile of obvious approval.
“Because,” she said, in a voice that was pleased too, and a nice voice, “I need help and I think you’re going to help me. I don’t approve of this. I didn’t want my husband to come here.”
“Indeed. Where did you want him to go, to the Atlantic Detective Agency?”
“Oh, no, if I had been in favor of his going to any detective at all, of course it would have been Nero Wolfe. But-may I explain?”
Wolfe glanced at the clock on the wall. Three-forty. In twenty minutes he would be leaving for the plant rooms on the roof, to monkey with the orchids. He said curtly, “I have eighteen minutes.”
Eugene put in with a determined voice, “Then I’m going to use them-”
But his wife smiled him out of it. She went on to Wolfe, “It won’t take that long. My husband and Mr. Blaney have been business partners for ten years. They own the firm of Blaney and Poor, manufacturers of novelties-you know, they make things like matches that won’t strike and chairs with rubber legs and bottled drinks that taste like soap-”
“Good God,” Wolfe muttered in horror.
She ignored it. “It’s the biggest firm in the business. Mr. Blaney gets the ideas and handles the production, he’s a genius at it, and my husband handles the business part, sales and so on. But Mr. Blaney is really just about too conceited to live, and now that the business is a big success he thinks my husband isn’t needed, and he wants him to get out and take twenty thousand dollars for his half. Of course it’s worth a great deal more than that, at least ten times as much, and my husband won’t do it. Mr. Blaney is very conceited, and also he will not let anything stand in his way. The argument has gone on and on, until now my husband is convinced that Mr. Blaney is capable of doing anything to get rid of him.”
“Of killing him. And you don’t agree.”
“Oh, no. I do agree. I think Mr. Blaney would stop at nothing.”
“Has he made threats?”
She shook her head. “He isn’t that kind. He doesn’t make threats, he just goes ahead.”
“Then why didn’t you want your husband to come to me?”
“Because he’s simply too stubborn to live.” She smiled at Eugene to take out any sting, and back at Wolfe. “There’s a clause in the partnership agreement, they signed it when they started the business, that says if either one of them dies the other one owns the whole thing. That’s another reason why my husband thinks Mr. Blaney wi
ll kill him, and I think so too. But what my husband wants is to make sure Mr. Blaney gets caught, that’s how stubborn he is, and what I want is for my husband to stay alive.”
“Now, Martha,” Eugene put in, “I came here to-” So her name was Martha. I had no prejudice against women named Martha.
She kept the floor. “It’s like this,” she appealed to Wolfe. “My husband thinks that Mr. Blaney is determined to kill him if he can’t get what he wants any other way, and I think so too. You yourself think that if a man is determined to kill another man nothing can stop him. So isn’t it perfectly obvious? My husband has over two hundred thousand dollars saved up outside the business, about half of it in war bonds. He can get another twenty thousand from Mr. Blaney for his half of the business-”
“It’s worth twenty times that,” Eugene said savagely, showing real emotion for the first time.
“Not to you if you’re dead,” she snapped back at him and went on to Wolfe. “With the income from that we could live more than comfortably-and happily. I hope my husband loves me-I hope he does-and I know I love him.” She leaned forward in her chair. “That’s why I came along today-I thought maybe you would help me persuade him. It isn’t as if I wouldn’t stand by my husband in a fight if there was any chance of his winning. But is there any sense in being so stubborn if you can’t possibly win? If instead of winning you will probably die? Now does that make sense? I ask you, Mr. Wolfe, you are a wise and clever and able man, what would you do if you were in my husband’s position?”
Wolfe muttered, “You put that as a question?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well. Granting that you have described the situation correctly, I would kill Mr. Blaney.”
She looked startled. “But that’s silly.” She frowned. “Of course you’re joking, and it’s no joke.”
“I’d kill the bastard in a second,” Eugene told Wolfe, “if I thought I could get away with it. I suppose you could, but I couldn’t.”