Fer-De-Lance

by Rex Stout

  “Why, don’t you believe it?”

  He shook his head. “They’ve got to show me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well���” He took another bite and swallowed it. “I don’t believe you could do it. I’ve handled a lot of golf clubs. I just don’t believe it.”

  I grinned at him. “You’re a skeptic, Mike. You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off. I don’t suppose you happen to know when Barstow had a birthday?”

  He didn’t know that. I started to fish around a little more, here and there, but there didn’t seem to be any more nibbles in that pool. Besides, the lunch hour was over, afternoon players were beginning to stroll up, and I saw Mike had his eyes on the caddy benches and was beginning to lose interest in me. I was about ready to scramble up and tell him the picnic was over, but he beat me to it. He was on his feet with a sudden spring, the kind young legs can make, and he tossed at me, “Excuse me, mister, that guy’s my baby,” and was off.

  I gathered up the papers and banana skins and went to the clubhouse. There were a good many more people around than when I had arrived in the morning, and finally I had to send an attendant for the chief steward because I couldn’t find him. He was busy, but he took time to show me where the library was and tell me to help myself. I looked around the shelves and in a minute had it spotted, the fat red Who’s Who in America. I turned to the entry I had already read in Wolfe’s office: BARSTOW, Peter Oliver, author, educator, physicist; b. Chatham, Ill., Apr. 9, 1875.

  I put the book back and went out to the lobby where I had seen some telephone booths, and called Sarah Barstow at her home and asked if I could drop in to see her for a minute. It was only a couple of miles out of my way returning to New York, and I thought I might as well clean this detail up. As I was going along the veranda to where I had parked the roadster I met Manuel Kimball. He was with some people, but when he saw me he nodded and I returned it, and I could guess what he was saying to the people with him because after I got past they turned to look at me.

  Ten minutes later I was on the Barstow drive.

  Small took me to a room in front that I hadn’t been in the day before. In a little while Sarah Barstow came in. She looked pale and determined, and I realized that with my phone call I must have scared her some more without wanting to. I should have been a little more explanatory; I don’t believe in pulling a dog’s tail if there’s anything else to do.

  I got up. She didn’t sit down.

  “I’ll only keep you a minute,” I said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you, only I ran across something that made me curious. Please tell me, was your father’s birthday April ninth?”

  She looked as if she was trying to breathe. She nodded.

  “Did your mother give him a bag of golf clubs his last birthday?”

  “Oh!” she said, and put her hand on the back of a chair.

  “Listen, Miss Barstow. Buck up. I think you know Nero Wolfe wouldn’t lie to you, and while he’s paying me you can regard me as Nero Wolfe. We might try tricky questions on you, but we wouldn’t tell you an honest lie. If you’ve been nursing the idea that the driver your father killed himself with was in the bag when your mother gave it to him on his birthday, forget it. We have reason to know it couldn’t have been. Impossible.”

  She just looked at me with her lips working but not opening. I don’t believe she would have been able to stand without her hand on the chair. She had a good hold on it.

  I said, “Maybe I’m telling you something and maybe I’m not. But I’ve brought this right to you as soon as I found it out, and I’m giving it to you straight. If it’s any help to you, you’re welcome, and how about making it fifty-fifty? I could use a little help too. Was that what was eating you, that birthday present? Was that the reason for all the fol-de-rol?”

  She got her tongue working at last but all she said was, “I don’t believe you would lie to me. It would be too cruel.”

  “I wouldn’t. But even if I would, I know about the birthday present anyhow, so you can answer my simple question without running a temperature. Was that what was eating you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That and-yes, it was that.”

  “What else was it?”

  “Nothing. My mother���”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “Your mother got goofy sometimes and got ideas about your father, and she gave him a golf bag on his birthday. What else?”

  “Nothing.” She took her hand off the chair, but put it back again. “Mr. Goodwin. I think-I’ll sit down.”

  I went and took her arm and shoved the chair back a little with my foot, and held onto her until she got seated. She shut her eyes and I stood and waited till she opened them again.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I ought to buck up. I’m no good. It has been a strain. Not only this, a long while. I always thought my mother was a wonderful woman, I still think so, I know she is. But it is so ugly! Dr. Bradford says he believes that now, since Father is dead, Mother will be completely cured and will never again have any-difficulties. But much as I love my mother, that is too high a price. I think we would be better off without modern psychology, everything it tells us is so ugly. It was at my father’s suggestion that I studied it.”

  “Anyway, this is one thing off your mind.”

  “Yes. I can’t appreciate it yet, but I will. I ought to thank you, Mr. Goodwin, I’m sorry. You say that my mother had nothing-that she couldn’t���”

  “I say that the driver that killed your father wasn’t anywhere on April ninth. It didn’t exist until at least a month later.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Just damn sure.”

  “Well. That’s a good deal.” She tried to smile at me, and I admired her nerve, for it was easy to see that she was so near gone from worry and grief and loss of sleep that you might as well have expected a guffaw from Job. Anyone with an ounce of decency in him would have got up and left her alone with the good news I’d brought her; but business is business, and it wouldn’t have been right to pass up the chance that she was unstrung enough to loosen up at a vital point. I said: “Don’t you think you might tell me who took the golf bag from the car and where it is now? Now that we know that the driver is not the one that was in it when your mother gave it to him?”

  She said without hesitation, “Small took it from the car.”

  My heart jumped the way it did when I saw Wolfe’s lips push out. She was going to spill it! I went right on without giving her time to consider, “Where did he take it to?”

  “Upstairs. To Father’s room.”

  “Who took it away from there?”

  “I did. Saturday evening, after Mr. Anderson came. It was Sunday that the men searched the house for it.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  “I drove to Tarrytown and got on the ferry and dropped it in the middle of the river. I filled it full of stones.”

  “You’re lucky they weren’t tailing you. Of course you examined the driver. Did you take it apart?”

  “I didn’t examine it. I was in a hurry.”

  “You didn’t examine it? You mean you didn’t even take it out and look at it?”

  “No.”

  I stared at her. “I’ve got a better opinion of you. I don’t believe you’re such an awful fool. You’re stringing me.”

  “No. No, I’m not, Mr. Goodwin.”

  I still stared. “You mean you actually did all that? Without even looking at the driver? Leave it to a woman! What were your brother and Bradford doing, playing billiards?”

  She shook her head. “They had nothing to do with it.”

  “But Bradford says that your mother will be all right now that your father’s dead.”

  “Well? If that is his opinion-” She stopped; the mention of her mother had been a mistake, it had her down again. After a minute she looked up at me, and for the first time I saw tears in her eyes. Two hung there. “You wa
nted me to go fifty-fifty, Mr. Goodwin. That’s my share.”

  Something about her, the tears maybe, made her look like nothing but a kid, trying to be brave. I reached down and patted her on the shoulder and said: “You’re a good sport, Miss Barstow. I’ll let you alone.”

  I went to the hall and got my hat and left.

  But, I thought, in the roadster again headed south down the highway. Plenty of But. Part of it was that as much as I respected filial devotion and as much as I liked Sarah Barstow, it would have been a real satisfaction to put her across my knees and pull up her skirts and giver her a swell fanning, for not taking a look at that driver. I had to believe her and I did believe her. She hadn’t made that up. Now the driver was gone for good. With a lot of luck and patience it might have been grappled out of the river, but it would have cost more money than Nero Wolfe was apt to let go of. It was just simply goodbye driver. As I went through White Plans it was a temptation to leave the Parkway and run over to the District Attorney’s office and say to Anderson, “I’ll bet you ten dollars that the golf bag containing the driver that killed Barstow is at the bottom of the Hudson River halfway between Tarrytown and Nyack.” It wouldn’t have been a bad idea at that, for he might have sent a couple of boats out and found it. But as things turned out it was just as well I didn’t.

  I had had it in mind to go back to New York by another route, Blueberry Road, and just for curiosity take a look at the spot where Carlo Maffei’s body had been found; not that I expected to discover that the murderer had left his scarfpin or automobile license lying around, just thinking that it never hurts a spot to look at it. But dropping in on Sarah Barstow had used up some time, and I wanted to make a call in the city. So I took the quickest way in.

  On upper Park Avenue I stopped at a drugstore and phoned Wolfe. He had called Bradford’s office once more, around eleven-thirty, but it had been the same story, too busy to come to the phone. He told me to go to it. I thought to myself, if he’s busy now he’s going to be positively rushed before we get through with him. It took me less than ten minutes to get to Sixty-ninth Street, and I parked around the corner.

  Dr. Nathaniel Bradford certainly had an office. The entrance hall was wide enough to have a row of Brazilian ferns along each side, and the anteroom was big and grand. The lights and rugs and pictures and chairs made it plain, but not noisy, that everything done in that place was on a high level, including making out the patients’ bills. But the chairs were all empty. The girl in starched white at a desk over in a corner told me that Dr. Bradford was not in. She seemed surprised that I didn’t know that, just as I would know that Central Park begins at Fifty-ninth Street, and asked if I was a former patient. Then she said that the doctor was never in his office in the afternoon before four-thirty, and that he never saw anyone except by appointment. When I said that that was what I wanted to see him for, to make an appointment, she raised her eyebrows. I went back to the street.

  At first I thought I would wait around for him, but it was only a little after three, so I went and sat in the roadster and let my mind out for a stroll to see if it would run across an idea for passing the time. In a few minutes it did, a pretty one. I went to a restaurant on Park Avenue to look at a telephone book, and then went back to the car and stepped on the starter and started along Sixty-ninth Street, and at Fifth Avenue turned downtown. At Forty-first Street I headed east.

  As usual every car along the curb was laying its head on the next one’s tail, and I had to go nearly to Third Avenue to find a space where I could edge the roadster in. I walked back almost two crosstown blocks, and found that the number I was looking for was one of the new office buildings a mile high. The directory said that my meat was on the twentieth floor. The elevator shot me up and I found it on a door down the corridor: Metropolitan Medical Record.

  It was a young man, not a girl, at the desk in the outside room; that was nice for a change. I said to him: “I’d like to ask a favor, if you’re not too busy to help me out a little. Would you have any record showing the meetings of medical associations and so on held in New York on June fifth?”

  He grinned. “The Lord knows I’m not busy. Yes, sir, we have. Of course. Just a minute. June fifth?”

  He went to a stack of magazines on a shelf and took off the top one. “This is our last issue, it would have it.” He began flipping the pages and stopped around the middle and looked at it. I waited. “Nothing on the fifth, I’m afraid-Oh yes, here it is. Most of the big meetings come later. On the fifth the New York Neurological Society was at the Knickerbocker Hotel.”

  I asked if I could look at it and he handed it to me. I ran through the paragraph. “I see. This is a notice of the meeting. Of course it was printed before the meeting took place. You wouldn’t have anything later? A report, a write-up?”

  He shook his head. “There’ll be one in our next issue I suppose. Was it something particular you wanted? The daily papers may have run it.”

  “Maybe. I haven’t tried them. What I’m looking for is a report of Dr. Bradford’s paper. As a matter of fact, all I want is to make sure he was there. You wouldn’t know?”

  He shook his head. “But if all you want to know is whether he was there or not, why don’t you ask him?”

  I grinned. “I hate to bother him. But of course it’s quite simple, I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought that by dropping in here I could save time.”

  He said, “Wait a minute,” and disappeared through a door to an inner office. He didn’t take much more than the minute he mentioned. When he came back he told me, “Mr. Elliot says that Dr. Bradford was at the meeting and delivered his paper.”

  Elliot, he said, was the editor of the Record. I asked if I could speak to him. The young man disappeared through the door again, and after a moment it opened once more and a big red-faced man in his shirt sleeves came through. One of the brusque breezy kind. “What’s all this? What’s this about?”

  I explained. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and said that he had attended the meeting and that Dr. Bradford had delivered his most interesting paper to applause. He was writing it up for the August Record. I questioned him, and he took it very nicely. Yes, he meant Dr. Nathaniel Bradford whose office was on Sixty-ninth Street. He had known him for years. He couldn’t say at what hour Bradford had arrived at the hotel, but it had been a dinner meeting and he had seen Bradford at his table as early as seven and on the speaking platform as late as ten-thirty.

  I guess I went out without thanking him. Driving back uptown I was sore as a pup. Of course it was Bradford I was sore at. What the devil did he mean by fooling around at a meeting reading a paper on neurology when I had him all set up in Westchester County sticking a knife into Carlo Maffei?

  I supposed it would have taken me about a year to get introduced to Dr. Nathaniel Bradford if I hadn’t been so sore when I got back to his office. There were two patients waiting this time. The doctor was in. I asked the girl at the desk for a piece of paper and sat down and held it on a magazine and wrote on it:

  Dr. Bradford: For the last few days I’ve been sure you were a murderer but now I know you are just an old fool. The same goes for Mrs. Barstow and her son and daughter. It will take me about three minutes to tell you how I know.

  Archie Goodwin For Nero Wolfe

  By the time the two patients had been taken care of some more had come in, and I went over to the girl and told her I was next. She got impatient and began explaining to me what an appointment was. I said:���“It wouldn’t break any furniture if you just handed him this note. Honest, I’m in a hurry. Be human. I’ve got a sister at home. Don’t read it yourself because there’s a swear-word in it.”

  She looked disgusted, but she took the note and went away with it through the door where the patients had gone. After a while she came back and stood on the threshold and said my name. I took my hat along with me because there had been time enough to call a cop.

  One look at Dr. Bradford was enou
gh to show me that I had been wasting a lot of pleasant suspicions which might have been avoided if I had happened to catch sight of him somewhere. He was tall and grave and correct, the distinguished old gentleman type, and he had whiskers! There may have been a historical period when it was possible for a guy with whiskers to pull a knife and plunge it into somebody’s back, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it couldn’t be done. Bradford’s were gray, so was his hair. To tell the truth, as tight as his alibi for June fifth had been made by my trip to Forty-first Street, I had been prepared to try to find a leak in it until I got a look at him.

  I went over to where he sat at his desk, and stood there. He just looked at me until the door had closed behind the girl, then he said: “Your name is Goodwin. Are you a genius too?”

  “Yes, sir.” I grinned. “I caught it from Nero Wolfe. Sure, I remember he told Miss Barstow he was a genius, and of course she told you. Maybe you thought it was only a joke.”

  “No. I kept an open mind. But whether you are a genius or merely an impertinent ass, I can’t keep my patients waiting for you. What is this note you sent me, bait? I’ll give you three minutes to justify it.”

  “That’s plenty. I’ll put it this way: Nero Wolfe discovered certain facts. From those facts he reached a certain conclusion as to the cause and manner of Barstow’s death. When the autopsy verified his conclusion it also verified his facts; that is, it made them an inseparable part of the picture, and whoever killed Barstow has got to fit those facts. Well, the Barstows don’t fit, none of them. You don’t either. You’re a washout.”

  “Go on.”

  “Go on?”

  “That’s a good general statement. Specify.”

  “Oh no.” I shook my head. “That’s not the way us geniuses work, you can’t shake us empty like a bag of peanuts. For one thing, it would take a lot longer than three minutes. For another, what do you expect for nothing? You’ve got a nerve. Something happens to get you into such a state that you can’t tell coronary thrombosis from an epileptic fit, and to keep you on such an edge for days that you’re afraid to go to the telephone, and it’s all right for Nero Wolfe to spend his time and money chasing the clouds away for you and turning on the sunshine, but he mustn’t make a nuisance of himself. I’ve got to send you in a trick note just to have the honor of looking at your whiskers. You’ve got a nerve.”