by Rex Stout
He turned to Wolfe. “Anyone else?” Wolfe shook his head and Cramer resumed:
“That’s all. Send Stebbins here right away. Wherever they are, find them and get them here. Send men out if you have to. Yeah, I know, all right, they raise hell, what’s the difference how I lose my job if I lose it? Wolfe says I’m desperate, and you know Wolfe, he reads faces. Step on it.”
Cramer went back to the red leather chair, sat, pulled out a cigar and sank his teeth in it, and rasped, “There. I never thought I’d come to this.”
“Frankly,” Wolfe muttered, “I was surprised to see you. With what Mr. Goodwin and I furnished you yesterday I would have guessed you were making headway.”
“Sure,” Cramer chewed the cigar. “Headway in the thickest damn fog I ever saw. That was a big help, what you and Goodwin furnished. In the first place-”
“Excuse me,” Dexter put in. He stood up. “I have some phone calls to make.”
“If they’re private,” I told him, “there’s a phone upstairs you can use.”
“No, thanks.” He looked at me impolitely. “I’ll go and find a booth.” He started out, halted to say over his shoulder that he would be back in half an hour, and went. I moseyed to the hall to see that he didn’t stumble on the sill, and after the door had closed behind him returned to the office. Cramer was talking:
“… and we’re worse off than we were before. Zeros all the way across. If you care for any details, take your pick.”
Wolfe grunted. “The photograph and car license mailed to Mrs. Boone. The envelope. Will you have some beer?”
“Yes, I will. Fingerprints, all the routine, nothing. Mailed midtown Friday eight P.M. How would you like to check sales of envelopes in the five-and-dimes?”
“Archie might try it.” It was a sign we were all good friends when Wolfe, speaking to Cramer, called me Archie. Usually it was Mr. Goodwin. “What about those cylinders?”
“They were dictated by Boone on March 19th and typed by Miss Gunther on the 20th. The carbons are in Washington and the FBI has checked them. Miss Gunther can’t understand it, except on the assumption that Boone picked up the wrong case when he left his office Tuesday afternoon, and she says he didn’t often make mistakes like that. But if that was it the case containing the cylinders he dictated Tuesday afternoon ought to be still in his office in Washington, and it isn’t. No sign of it. There’s one other possibility. We’ve asked everyone concerned not to leave the city, but on Thursday the BPR asked permission for Miss Gunther to go to Washington on urgent business, and we let her. She flew down and back. She had a suitcase with her.”
Wolfe shuddered. The idea of people getting on airplanes voluntarily was too much for him. He flashed a glance at Cramer. “I see you have eliminated nothing. Was Miss Gunther alone on her trip?”
“She went down alone. Dexter and two other BPR men came back with her.”
“She has no difficulty explaining her movements?”
“She has no difficulty explaining anything. That young woman has no difficulty explaining period.”
Wolfe nodded. “I believe Archie agrees with you.” The beer had arrived, escorted by Fritz, and he was pouring. “I suppose you’ve had a talk with Mr. O’Neill.”
“A talk?” Cramer raised his hands, one of them holding a glass of beer. “Saint Agnes! Have I had a talk with that bird!”
“Yes, he talks. As Archie told you, he was curious about what was on those cylinders.”
“He still is.” Cramer had half emptied his glass and hung onto it. “The damn fool thought he could keep that envelope. He wanted to have a private dick, not you, investigate it, so he said.” He drank again. “Now there’s an example of what this case is like. Would you want a better lead than an envelope like that? BPR stock, special delivery, one stamp canceled and the others not, typewritten address? Shall I tell you in detail what we’ve done, including trying a thousand typewriters?”
“I think not.”
“I think not too. It would only take all night to tell you. The goddam post office says it’s too bad they can’t help us, but with all the new girls they’ve got, stamps canceled, stamps not canceled, you never can tell.”
Cramer emptied the bottle into the glass. “You heard that crack I made to Rowcliffe about my losing my job.”
“That?” Wolfe waved it away.
“Yeah I know,” Cramer agreed. “I’ve made it before. It’s a habit. All inspectors tell their wives every evening that they’ll probably be captains tomorrow. But this time I don’t know. From the standpoint of a Homicide Squad inspector, an atom bomb would be a baby firecracker compared to this damn thing. The Commissioner has got St. Vitus’s Dance. The D.A. is trying to pretend his turn doesn’t come until it’s time to panel a jury. The Mayor is having nightmares, and he must have got it in a dream that if there wasn’t any Homicide Squad there wouldn’t be any murders, at least not any involving big-time citizens. So it’s all my fault. I mustn’t get tough with refined people who have got to the point where they employ tax experts to make sure they’re not cheating the government. On the other hand, I must realize that public sentiment absolutely demands that the murderer of Cheney Boone shall not go unpunished. It’s six days since it happened, and here by God I sit beefing to you.”
He drank his glass empty, put it down, and used the back of his hand for a napkin. “That’s the situation, my fat friend, as Charlie McCarthy said to Herbert Hoover. Look what I’m doing, letting you take the wheel is what it amounts to, at least long enough for you to run me in a ditch if you happen to need to. I know damn well that no client of yours has ever been convicted of murder, and in this case your clients-”
“No man is my client,” Wolfe interposed. “My client is an association. An association can’t commit murder.”
“Maybe not. Even so, I know how you work. If you thought it was necessary, in the interest of the client-I guess here he comes or here it comes.”
The doorbell had rung. I went to answer it, and found that Cramer’s guess was right. This first arrival was a piece of our client, in the person of Hattie Harding. She seemed out of breath. There in the hall she gripped my arm and wanted to know:
“What is it? Have they-what is it?”
I used the hand of my other arm to pat her shoulder. “No, no, calm down. You’re all tense. We’ve decided to have these affairs twice a week, that’s all.”
I took her to the office and put her to helping me with chairs.
From then on they dribbled in, one by one. Purley Stebbins arrived and apologized to his boss for not making it quicker, and took him aside to explain something. G. G. Spero of the FBI was third and Mrs. Boone fourth. Along about the middle Solomon Dexter returned, and finding the red leather chair unoccupied at the moment, copped it for himself. The Erskine family came separately, a quarter of an hour apart, and so did Breslow and Winterhoff. On the whole, as I let them in, they returned my greeting as a fellow member of the human race, one word or none, but there were two exceptions. Don O’Neill looked straight through me and conveyed the impression that if I touched his coat it would have to be sent to the cleaners, so I let him put it on the rack himself. Alger Kates acted as if I was paid to do the job, so no embraces were called for. Nina Boone, who came late, smiled at me. I didn’t imagine it; she smiled right at me. To repay her, I saw to it that she got the same position she had had before, the chair next to mine.
I had to hand it to the Police Department as inviters. It was ten-forty, just an hour and ten minutes since Cramer had phoned Rowcliffe to get up a party. I stood and looked them over, checking off, and then turned to Wolfe and told him:
“It’s the same as last time, Miss Gunther just doesn’t like crowds. They’re all here except her.”
Wolfe moved his eyes over the assemblage, slowly from right to left and back again, like a man trying to make up his mind which shirt to buy. They were all seated, divided into two camps as before, except that Winterhoff and Erskine the father were
standing over by the globe talking in undertones. From the standpoint of gaiety the party was a dud before it ever started. One second there would be a buzz of conversation, and the next second dead silence; then that would get on someone’s nerves and the buzz would start again. A photographer could have taken a shot of that collection of faces and called it I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.
Cramer came to my desk and used the phone and then told Wolfe, leaning over to him, “They got Miss Gunther at her apartment over an hour ago, and she said she’d come immediately.”
Wolfe shrugged. “We won’t wait. Go ahead.”
Cramer turned to face the guests, cleared his throat, and raised his voice:
“Ladies and gentlemen!” There was instant silence. “I want you to understand why you were asked to come here, and exactly what’s going on. I suppose you read the papers. According to the papers, at least some of them, the police are finding this case too hot to handle on account of the people involved, and they’re laying down on the job. I think every single person here knows how much truth there is in that. I guess all of you feel, or nearly all of you, that you’re being pestered and persecuted on account of something that you had nothing to do with. The newspapers have their angle, and you have yours. I suppose it was an inconvenience to all of you to come here this evening, but you’ve got to face it that there’s no way out of it, and you’ve got to blame that inconvenience not on the police or anybody else except one person, the person who killed Cheney Boone. I’m not saying that person is in this room. I admit I don’t know. He may be a thousand miles from here-”
“Is that,” Breslow barked, “what you got us here to listen to? We’re heard all that before!”
“Yeah, I know you have.” Cramer was trying not to sound sour. “We didn’t get you here to listen to me. I am now turning this over to Mr. Wolfe, and he will proceed, after I say two things. First, you got the request to come here from my office, but from here on it is not official. I am responsible for getting you here and that’s all. As far as I’m concerned you can all get up and go if you feel like it. Second, some of you may feel that this is improper because Mr. Wolfe has been engaged to work on this case by the National Industrial Association. That may be so. All I can say is, if you feel that way you can stay here and keep that in mind, or you can leave. Suit yourselves.”
He looked around. Nobody moved or spoke. Cramer waited ten seconds and then turned and nodded at Wolfe.
Wolfe heaved a deep sigh and opened up with a barely audible murmur:
“One thing Mr. Cramer mentioned, the inconvenience you people are being forced to endure, requires a little comment. I ask your forbearance while I make it. It is only by that kind of sacrifice on the part of persons, sometimes many persons, who are themselves wholly blameless-”
I hated to disturb his flow, because I knew from long experience that at last he was really working. He had resolved to get something out of that bunch if he had to keep them there all night. But there was no help for it, on account of the expression on Fritz’s face. A movement out in the hall had caught my eye, and Fritz was standing there, four feet back from the door to the office, which was standing open, staring wide-eyed at me. When he saw I was looking at him he beckoned to me to come, and the thought popped into my mind that, with guests present and Wolfe making an oration, that was precisely how Fritz would act if the house was on fire. The whole throng was between him and me, and I circled around behind them for my exit. Wolfe kept on talking. As soon as I made the hall I closed the door behind me and asked Fritz:
“Something biting you?”
“It’s-it’s-” He stopped and set his teeth on his lip. Wolfe had been trying to train Fritz for twenty years not to get excited. He tried again: “Come and I’ll show you.”
He dived for the kitchen and I followed, thinking it was some culinary calamity that he couldn’t bear up under alone, but he went to the door to the back stairs, the steps that led down to what we called the basement, though it was only three feet below the street level. Fritz slept down there in the room that faced the street. There was an exit through a little hall to the front; first a heavy door out to a tiny vestibule which was underneath the stoop, and then an iron gate, a grill, leading to a paved areaway from which five steps mounted to the sidewalk. It was in the tiny vestibule that Fritz stopped and I bumped into him.
He pointed down. “Look.” He put his hand on the gate and gave it a little shake. “I came to see if the gate was locked, the way I always do.”
There was an object huddled on the concrete of the areaway, up against the gate, so that the gate couldn’t be opened without pushing the object aside. I squatted to peer. The light there was dim, since the nearest street lamp was on the other side of the stoop, thirty paces away, but I could see well enough to tell what the object was, though not for certain who it was.
“What the hell did you bring me here for?” I demanded, pushing past Fritz to re-enter the basement. “Come with me.”
He was at my heels as I mounted the stairs. In the kitchen I detoured to jerk open a drawer and get a flashlight, and then went down the main hall to the front door, out to the stoop and down to the sidewalk, and down the five steps to the areaway. There, on the same side of the gate as the object, I squatted again and switched on the flashlight. Fritz was beside me, bending over.
“Shall I-” His voice was shaking and he had to start again. “Shall I hold the light?”
After half a minute I straightened up, told him, “You stay right here,” and headed for the stoop. Fritz had pulled the front door shut, and when I found myself fumbling to get the key in the hole I stood erect to take a deep breath and that stopped the fumbling. I went down the hall to the kitchen, to the phone there, and dialed the number of Dr. Vollmer, who lived down the street only half a block away. There were six buzzes before he answered.
“Doc? Archie Goodwin. Got your clothes on? Good. Get here as fast as you can. There’s a woman lying in our areaway, by the gate to the basement, been hit on the head, and I think she’s dead. There’ll be cops on it, so don’t shift her more than you have to. Right now? Okay.”
I took another breath, filling my chest, then took Fritz’s pad and pencil and wrote:
Phoebe Gunther is in our areaway dead. Hit on the head. Have phoned Vollmer.
I tore off the sheet and went to the office. I suppose I had been gone six minutes, not more, and Wolfe was still doing a monologue, with thirteen pairs of eyes riveted on him. I sidled around to the right, got to his desk, and handed him the note. He got it at a glance, gave it a longer glance, flashed one at me, and spoke without any perceptible change in tone or manner:
“Mr. Cramer. If you please. Mr. Goodwin has a message for you and Mr. Stebbins. Will you go with him to the hall?”
Cramer and Stebbins got up. As we went out Wolfe’s voice was resuming behind us:
“Now the question that confronts us is whether it is credible, under the circumstances as we know them…”
Chapter 19
THIRTY MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT was about the peak. At that moment I was alone in my room, two flights up, sitting in the chair by the window, drinking a glass of milk, or at least holding one in my hand. I do not ordinarily hunt for a cave in the middle of the biggest excitement and the most intense action, but this seemed to hit me in a new spot or something, and anyhow there I was, trying to arrange my mind. Or maybe my feelings. All I knew was that something inside of me needed a little arranging. I had just completed a tour of the battlefield, and at that hour the disposition of forces was as follows:
Fritz was in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee, and Mrs. Boone was there helping him.
Seven of the invited guests were scattered around the front room, with two homicide dicks keeping them company. They were not telling funny stories, not even Ed Erskine and Nine Boone, who were on the same sofa.
Lieutenant Rowcliffe and an underling with a notebook were in the spare bedroom, on the same floor as
mine, having a conversation with Hattie Harding, the Public Relations Queen.
Inspector Cramer, Sergeant Stebbins, and a couple of others were in the dining room firing questions at Alger Kates.
The four-star brass was in the office. Wolfe was seated beside his desk, the Police Commissioner was likewise at my desk, the District Attorney was in the red leather chair, and Travis and Spero of the FBI made a circle of it. That was where the high strategy would come from, if and when any came.
Another dick was in the kitchen, presumably to see that Mrs. Boone didn’t jump out a window and Fritz didn’t dust arsenic on the sandwiches. Others were in the halls, in the basement, all over; and still others kept coming and going from outdoors, reporting to, or getting orders from, Cramer or the Commissioner or the District Attorney.
Newspapermen had at one time infiltrated behind the lines, but they were now on the other side of the threshold. Out there the floodlights hadn’t been removed, and some miscellaneous city employees were still poking around, but most of the scientists, including the photographers, had departed. In spite of that the crowd, as I could see from the window near which my chair was placed, was bigger than ever. The house was only a five-minute taxi ride or a fifteen-minute walk from Times Square, and the news of a spectacular break in the Boone case had got to the theater crowds. The little party Wolfe had asked Cramer to arrange had developed into more than he had bargained for.
A piece of 1?-inch iron pipe, sixteen inches long, had been found lying on the concrete paving of the areaway. Phoebe Gunther had been hit on the head with it four times. Dr. Vollmer had certified her dead on arrival. She had also received bruises in falling, one on her cheek and mouth, presumably from the stoop, where she had been struck, to the areaway. The scientists had got that far before they removed the body.
I had been sitting in my room twenty minutes when I noticed that I hadn’t drunk any milk, but I hadn’t spilled any from the glass.