by Rex Stout
“You either mean it,” he said like a menace, “or you don’t. If it’s a bluff you’ll eat it. It is isn’t, for once in your life you’re going to be opened up.” His bony head swiveled to Hombert. “Let me take him, sir. Here in your office it might be embarrassing.”
“Imbecile,” Wolfe muttered. “Hopeless imbecile.” He applied the levers and got himself to his feet. “I had reluctantly accepted the necessity of a long and fruitless discussion of a singularly difficult problem, but this is farcical. Take me home, Archie.”
“No you don’t,” Ash said, even more a menace. He reached and gripped Wolfe’s arm. “You’re under arrest, my man. This time you-”
I was aware that Wolfe could move without delay when he had to, and, knowing what his attitude was toward anybody’s hand touching him, I had prepared myself for motion when I saw Ash grab his arm, but the speed and precision with which he slapped Ash on the side of his jaw were a real surprise, not only to me but to Ash himself. Ash didn’t even know it was coming until it was there, a healthy open-palm smack with a satisfactory sound effect. Simultaneously Ash’s eyes glittered and his left fist started, and I propelled myself up and forward. The emergency was too split-second to permit anything fancy, so I simply inserted myself in between, and Ash’s left collided with my right shoulder before it had any momentum to speak of. With great presence of mind I didn’t even bend an elbow, merely staying there as a barrier; but Wolfe, who claims constantly to detest a hubbub, said through his teeth:
“Hit him, Archie. Knock him down.”
By that time Hombert was there and Skinner was hovering. Seeing that they were voting against bloodshed, and not caring to be tossed in the coop for manhandling an inspector, I backed away. Wolfe glared at me and said, still through his teeth:
“I am under arrest. You are not. Telephone Mr. Parker to arrange for bail immed-”
“Goodwin is staying right here.” Ash’s eyes were really nasty. I had never had an impulse to send him a birthday greeting card, but I was surprised to learn how mean he was. “Or rather you’re both going with me-”
“Now listen.” Skinner had his hands spread out patting air, like a pleader calming a mob. “This is ridiculous. We all want-”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Oh, forget that! Technically I suppose-”
“Then I am. You can all go to the devil.” Wolfe went back to the big chair and sat down. “Mr. Goodwin will telephone our lawyer. If you want me out of here send for someone to carry me. If you want me to discuss anything with you, if you want a word out of me, vacate those warrants and get rid of Mr. Ash. He jars me.”
“I’ll take him,” Ash snapped. “He struck an officer.”
Skinner and Hombert looked at each other. Then they looked at Wolfe, then at me, and then at each other again. Skinner shook his head emphatically. Hombert regarded Wolfe once more and then turned his gaze on Ash.
“Inspector,” he said, “I think you had better leave this to the District Attorney and me. You haven’t been in charge of this case long enough to-uh-digest the situation, and while I consented to your proposal to get Wolfe down here, I doubt if you’re sufficiently aware of-uh-all the aspects. I have described to you the sources of the strongest pressure to take Inspector Cramer off of the case, which meant also removing him from his command, and therefore it is worth considering that Wolfe’s client is the National Industrial Association. Whether we want to consider it or not, we have to. You’d better return to your office, give the reports further study, and continue operations. Altogether, at this moment, there are nearly four hundred men working on this case. That’s enough of a job for one man.”
Ash’s jaw was working and his eyes were still glittering. “It’s up to you, sir,” he said with an effort. “As I told you, and as you already knew, Wolfe has been getting away with murder for years. If you want him to get away with calling one of your subordinates an imbecile and physically assaulting him, in your own office…”
“At the moment I don’t care a damn who gets away with what.” Hombert was a little exasperated. “I care about just one thing, getting this case solved, and if that doesn’t happen soon I may not have any subordinates. Get back on the job and phone me if there’s anything new.”
“Yes, sir.” Ash crossed to Wolfe, who was seated, until their toes touched. “Some day,” he promised, “I’ll help you lose some weight.” Then he strode out of the room.
I returned to my chair. Skinner had already returned to his. Hombert stood looking at the door that had closed behind the Inspector, ran his fingers through his hair, shook his head slowly a few times, moved to his own chair behind his desk, sat, and lifted a receiver from its cradle. In a moment he spoke into the transmitter:
“Bailey? Have that warrant for the arrest of Nero Wolfe as a material witness vacated. Right away. No, just cancel it. Send me-”
“And the search warrant,” I put in.
“Also the search warrant for Nero Wolfe’s house. No, cancel that too. Send the papers to me.”
He hung up and turned to Wolfe. “All right, you got away with it. Now what do you know?”
Wolfe sighed deep. A casual glance at his bulk might have given the impression that he was placid again, but to my experienced eye, seeing that he was tapping the arm of his chair with his middle finger, it was evident that there was still plenty of turmoil.
“First,” he muttered, “I would like to learn something. Why was Mr. Cramer demoted and disgraced?”
“He wasn’t.”
“Nonsense. Whatever you want to call it, why?”
“Officially, for a change of scene. Off the record, because he lost his head, considering who the people are that are involved, and took on a bigger load than the Department could handle. Whether you like it or not, there’s such a thing as sense of proportion. You cannot treat some people like a bunch of waterfront hoodlums.”
“Who brought the pressure?”
“It came from everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m giving no names. Anyhow, that wasn’t the only reason. Cramer was muffing it. For the first time since I’ve known him he got tangled up. Here at a conference yesterday morning he couldn’t even discuss the problem intelligently. He had got his mind fixed on one aspect of it, one little thing, and that was all he could think of or talk about-that missing cylinder, the tenth cylinder that may or may not have been in the leather case Boone gave to Miss Gunther just before he was murdered.”
“Mr. Cramer was concentrating on that?”
“Yes. He had fifty men looking for it, and he wanted to assign another fifty to it.”
“And that was one of your reasons for removing him?”
“Yes. Actually the main reason.”
Wolfe grunted. “Hah. Then you’re an imbecile too. I didn’t know Mr. Cramer had it in him to see that. This doubles my admiration and respect for him. Finding that cylinder, if not our only chance, is beyond all comparison our best one. If it is never found the odds are big that we’ll never get the murderer.”
A loud disgusted snort came from Skinner. “That’s you all right, Wolfe! I suspected it was only fireworks. You said you’ve already got him.”
“I said nothing of the sort.”
“You said you know who it is.”
“No.” Wolfe was truculent. Having been aroused to the point of committing assault and battery, he had by no means calmed down again. “I said I know something that gives me a good clear idea of the murderer’s identity, and I also said that you people know it too. You know many things that I don’t know. Don’t try to pretend that I bulldozed you into ejecting Mr. Ash and releasing me from custody by conveying the impression that I am prepared to name the culprit and supply the evidence. I am not.”
Hombert and Skinner looked at each other. There was a silence.
“You impervious bastard,” Skinner said, but wasting no energy on it.
“In effect, then,” Hombert said resentfully, “you are saying tha
t you have nothing to tell us, that you have nothing to offer, that you can’t help us any.”
“I’m helping all I can. I am paying a man twenty dollars a day to explore the possibility that Miss Gunther broke that cylinder into little pieces and put it in the rubbish receptacle in her apartment in Washington. That’s going to an extreme, because I doubt if she destroyed it. I think she expected to use it some day.”
Hombert shifted impatiently in his chair as if the idea of hunting for a lousy cylinder, possibly broken anyhow, only irritated him. “Suppose,” he said, “you tell us what it is we all know that gives you a good clear idea of who the murderer is, including the who. Off the record.”
“It isn’t any one thing.”
“I don’t care if it’s a dozen things. I’ll try to remember them. What are they?”
Wolfe shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Because of your idiotic treatment of Mr. Cramer. If it seemed to make sense to you, and I believe it would, you would pass it on to Mr. Ash, and heaven knows what he would do. He might even, by pure chance, do something that would result in his solving the case, and I would stop short of nothing to prevent that outcome.” Wolfe’s middle finger started tapping again. “Help Mr. Ash to a triumph? God forbid!” He frowned at Hombert. “Besides, I’ve already given you the best advice I’ve got. Find that cylinder. Put a hundred men on it, a thousand. Find it!”
“We’re not neglecting the damn cylinder. How about this, do you think Miss Gunther knew who killed Boone?”
“Certainly she did.”
Skinner broke in. “Naturally you’d like that,” he said pessimistically, “since it would eliminate your clients. If Miss Gunther knew who it was, and it was an NIA man, she would have handed it to us on a platter. So if she did know, it was and is one of the other four-Dexter or Kates or one of the Boone women.”
“Not at all,” Wolfe contradicted him.
“But damn it, of course!”
“No.” Wolfe sighed. “You’re missing the whole point. What has been the outstanding fact about this case for a whole week now? What was its peculiar characteristic? This, that the public, the people, had immediately brought the case to trial as usual, without even waiting for an arrest, and instead of the customary prolonged disagreement and dissension regarding various suspects, they reached an immediate verdict. Almost unanimously they convicted-this was the peculiar fact-not an individual, but an organization. The verdict was that the National Industrial Association had murdered Cheney Boone. Now what if you were Miss Gunther and knew who had killed Boone? No matter how you knew, that’s another question; the point is that you knew. I think she did know. Let’s suppose she knew it was young Mr. Erskine. Would she have exposed him? No. She was devoted to the interests of her own organization, the BPR. She saw the rising tide of resentment and indignation against the NIA, constantly increasing in force and intensity. She saw that it might result, if sustained long enough, in completely discrediting the NIA and its purposes, policies, and objectives. She was intelligent enough to calculate that if an individual, no matter who, were arrested for the murder with good evidence, most of the resentment against the NIA would be diverted away from it as an organization.”
Wolfe sighed again. “What would she do? If she had evidence that pointed to Mr. Erskine, or to anyone else, she would suppress it; but she wouldn’t destroy it, for she wouldn’t want the murderer eventually to escape his punishment. She would put it where it wouldn’t be found, but where she could retrieve it and produce it when the time came, when the NIA had been sufficiently damaged. It is not even necessary to assume loyalty to the BPR as her dominating motive. Suppose it was personal devotion to Mr. Boone and a desire to avenge him. The best possible revenge, the perfect revenge, would be to use his death and the manner of it for the discomfiture and the destruction of the organization which had hated him and tried to thwart him. In my opinion Miss Gunther was capable of that. She was a remarkable young woman. But she made the mistake of permitting the murderer to learn that she knew who he was, how is still another question, and that she paid for.”
Wolfe raised his hand and let it fall. “However, note this. Her own death served her purpose too. In the past two days the wave of anger against the NIA has increased tremendously. It is going deep into the feeling of the people, and soon it will be impossible to dredge it out again. She was a remarkable woman. No, Mr. Skinner, Miss Gunther’s knowing the identity of the murderer would not eliminate my clients. Besides, no man is my client, and no men are. My checks come from the National Industrial Association, which, having no soul, could not possibly commit a murder.”
Wolfe cocked an eye at Hombert. “Speaking of checks. You have seen the NIA advertisement offering a reward of one hundred thousand dollars. You might let your men know that whoever finds the missing cylinder will get that reward.”
“Yes?” Hombert was skeptical. “You’re as bad as Cramer. What makes you so damn sure about that cylinder? Have you got it in your pocket?”
“No. If I had!”
“What makes you so sure about it?”
“Well. I can’t put it in a sentence.”
“We’ve got all the time there is.”
“Didn’t Mr. Cramer explain it to you?”
“Forget Cramer. He’s out of it.”
“Which is nothing to your credit, sir.” Wolfe rearranged his pressures and angles, shifting the mass to get the center of gravity exactly right for maximum comfort. An unaccustomed chair always presented him with a complicated engineering problem. “You really want me to go into this?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Skinner?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I will.” Wolfe closed his eyes. “It was apparent from the beginning that Miss Gunther was lying about the leather case. Mr. Cramer knew that, of course. Four people stated that they saw her leaving the reception room with it, people who couldn’t possibly have been aware, at the time, that its contents had anything to do with the murder-unless they were all involved in a murder conspiracy, which is preposterous-and therefore had no valid reason for mendacity. Also, Mrs. Boone was barely able to stop herself short of accusing Miss Gunther of falsehood, and Mrs. Boone was at the same table with her in the ballroom. So Miss Gunther was lying. You see that.”
“Keep right on,” Skinner growled.
“I intend to. Why did she lie about the case and pretend that it had disappeared? Obviously because she didn’t want the text of the cylinders, one or more of them, to become known. Why didn’t she? Not merely because it contained confidential BPR information or intent. Such a text, as she knew, could safely have been entrusted to FBI ears, but she audaciously and jauntily suppressed it. She did that because something in it pointed definitely and unmistakably to the murderer of Mr. Boone. She-”
“No,” Hombert objected. “That’s out. She lied about the case before she could have known that. She told us Wednesday morning, the morning after Boone was killed, about leaving the case on the window sill in the reception room, before she had had an opportunity to listen to what was on the cylinders. So she couldn’t have known that.”
“Yes she could.”
“She could tell what was on those cylinders without having access to a Stenophone machine?”
“Certainly. At least one of them. Mr. Boone told her what was on it when he gave her the leather case Tuesday evening, in the room there where he was soon to die. She lied about that too; naturally she had to. She lied about it to me, most convincingly, in my office Friday evening. I should have warned her then that she was being foolhardy to the point of imprudence, but I didn’t. I would have wasted my breath. Caution with respect to personal peril was not in her makeup-as the event proved. If it had been, she would not have permitted a man whom she knew to be capable of murder get close to her, alone, on the stoop of my house.”
Wolfe shook his head, his eyes still closed. “She was really extraordinary. It would be int
eresting to know where she concealed the case, containing the cylinders, up to Thursday afternoon. It would have been too risky to hide it in Mr. Kates’s apartment, which might have been searched by the police at any moment. Possibly she checked it in the Grand Central parcel room, though that seems a little banal for her. At any rate, she had it with her in her suitcase when she went to Washington Thursday afternoon, with Mr. Dexter and with your permission.”
“Cramer’s permission,” Hombert grumbled.
Wolfe ignored it. “I would like to emphasize,” he said with his voice up a little, “that none of this is conjecture except unimportant details of chronology and method. In Washington Miss Gunther went to her office, listened to the cylinders, and learned which one bore the message that Mr. Boone had told her about. Doubtless she wanted to know exactly what it said, but also she wanted to simplify her problem. It isn’t easy to conceal an object the size of that case from an army of expert searchers. She wanted to reduce it to one little cylinder. Another thing, she had contrived a plot. She took the nine eliminated cylinders to her Washington apartment and hid them casually in a hatbox on a closet shelf. She also took ten other cylinders that had been previously used which were there in her office, put them in the leather case, brought it with her when she returned to New York, and checked it in the Grand Central parcel room.
“That was in preparation for her plot, and she probably would have proceeded with it the next day, using the police for the mystification, if it hadn’t been for that invitation I sent around for a discussion at my office. She decided to wait for developments. Why she ignored my invitation I don’t know, and I shall intrude no guesses. That same evening, Friday, Mr. Goodwin went after her and brought her to my office. She had made a profound impression on him, and she struck me as being of uncommon quality. Evidently her opinion of us was less flattering. She formed the idea that we were more vulnerable to guile than the police; and the next day, Saturday, after she had mailed the parcel room check to Mr. O’Neill and made the phone call to him, giving the name of Dorothy Unger, she sent me a telegram, signing Mr. Breslow’s name to it, conveying the notion that observation of Mr. O’Neill’s movements might be profitable. We validated her appraisal of us. Mr. Goodwin was at Mr. O’Neill’s address bright and early Sunday morning, as Miss Gunther intended him to be. When Mr. O’Neill emerged he was followed, and you know what happened.”