“No, sir,” I said. I was feeling battered but self-satisfied, and I had my breath back. “This is her husband, Mr. Harold Anthony from the financial district, a college man. He tailed her from her office, and tailed her and me clear here, and he thought I was bringing her as a plaything for you. Evidently he knows your reputation. He aimed for my face and missed, on the sidewalk out in front. He has taken lessons and it took me ten minutes or more to nail him, which I did with three kidney punches. He was down flat. Is that correct, Mr. Anthony?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Okay. Scotch, rye, or bourbon?”
“Plenty of bourbon.”
“We have it. Mr. Wolfe will ask Fritz to bring it. The bathroom is this way. Come along.”
Wolfe’s voice came behind us, “Confound it, where is Mrs. Anthony?”
“No soap,” I told him from the bathroom door. “You’ll have to stifle your desires for tonight. She went for a walk. Her husband is substituting for her.”
13.
A few feet from the end of Wolfe’s desk is a roomy and comfortable red leather chair, and next to it on one side is a solid little table made of massaranduba, the primary function of which is as a resting place for checkbooks while clients write in them. Harold Anthony sat in the chair, with a bottle of bourbon at his elbow on the little table, while Wolfe kept at him for over an hour.
Mr. Anthony had a conviction: the stock department of Naylor-Kerr was a hotbed of lust and lechery where the primitive appetites germinated like sweet potato sprouts.
Mr. Anthony had a record: since he had got out of the Army in November he had bopped four assorted men whom he had detected in the act of escorting his wife somewhere, and one of them had gone to a hospital with a broken jaw. He did not know if one of them had been named either Wally or Moore.
Mr. Anthony had an alibi: the evening of December 4 had been spent by him in a bowling alley, with friends. They had quit around eleven-thirty and he had gone home. When Wolfe observed that that would have left him plenty of time to get over to Thirty-ninth Street and run a car over Moore, he agreed without hesitation but added that he couldn’t have had the car, since it had been stolen before eleven-twenty, at which time the owner, coming from the theater, had arrived where he had parked the car and found it gone.
“You appear,” Wolfe commented, “to have followed the accounts of Mr. Moore’s death with interest and assiduity. In newspapers?”
“Yes.”
“Why were you interested?”
“Because the papers had pictures of Moore, and I recognized him as the man I had seen with my wife a few days before.”
“Where?”
“Getting into a taxi on Broadway, downtown.”
“Had you spoken with him?”
“Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off.”
“Cooled? By what process?”
“I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife.”
“You did?” Wolfe scowled at him. “What’s the matter with your brain? Does it leak? You said you didn’t know whether one of your wife’s escorts, the ones you bombarded, was named Moore.”
“Sure I did.” The husband was not disturbed. “What the hell, I didn’t know then you were going into it.”
He was really two different persons. Sitting there with a couple of men, drinking good bourbon, he had poise and he knew the score. I would hardly have recognized him as the wild-eyed infuriated male moose who had lost all self-control at the sight of me helping an assistant chief filer from a taxicab, if it hadn’t been for a band-aid covering a gash on his face. The gash was the result of my having neglected to remember, for a brief moment, that cheekbones are hard on knuckles.
At the beginning, after he and I had finished in the bathroom and returned to the office, he had been suspicious and cagey, even with bourbon in him, until he was satisfied that I really had been bringing Rosa there on business. Then, when he learned that the business was an inquiry into the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore, it took him only a minute to decide that his best line was full and frank co-operation if he wanted any help from us in keeping his wife out of it as far as possible. At least that was the way it looked to me, and by the time we got to his alibi for December 4 I was almost ready to regard him as a fellow being.
Around a quarter to ten he left, not because the bottle was empty or Wolfe had run out of questions, but because Saul Panzer arrived. I let Saul in, and as he headed for the office the husband came out, got his things from the rack, and grunted and groaned without any false modesty as he got into his coat. He offered a hand.
“Christ, I’ll be a cripple for a week,” he admitted. “That right of yours would dent a tank.”
I acknowledged the compliment, closed the door after him, and returned to the office.
Saul Panzer, who was under size, who had a nose which could be accounted for only on the theory that a nose is all a face needs, and who always looked as if he had shaved the day before, was the best free-lance operative in New York. He was the only colleague I knew that I would give a blank check to and forget it. He had come to make a report, and, judging from the ground it covered, Wolfe must have got in touch with him and put him to work that morning as soon as I had left the house.
But that was about all you could say for it, that it covered lots of ground. He had talked with squad men who had worked on the case, had gone through three newspaper files, had been shown the record by Captain Bowen downtown, and had even seen the owner of the car; and all he had harvested was one of the most complete collections of negatives I had ever seen. No fingerprints from the car; nobody had any idea what Moore had been doing on Thirty-ninth Street; no one had seen the car being parked, afterwards, on Ninety-fifth Street; not a single lead had been picked up anywhere. The police knew about Moore’s friendship with Mrs. Pine, and his romantic career at Naylor-Kerr, and a few other things about him that were news to me, but none of them had turned on a light they could see by. It was now, for them, past history, and they had other things to do, except that a hit-and-run manslaughter was never finished business until they collared him.
“One little thing,” said Saul, who wasn’t pleased with himself. “The body was found at one-ten in the morning. An M.E. arrived at one-forty-two. His quick guess was that Moore had been dead about two hours, and the final report more or less agreed with him. So we have these alternatives: first, the body was there on the street, from around midnight until ten after one, with nobody seeing it. Second, the M.E. report is a bad guess and he hadn’t been dead so long. Third, the body wasn’t there all that time but was somewhere else. I mentioned it downtown, and they don’t think it’s a thing at all, not even a little one. They have settled for either number one or number two, or a combination. They say Thirty-ninth Street between Tenth and Eleventh might easily be that empty from midnight on.”
Saul turned his palms up. “You can pay me expenses and forget it.”
“Nonsense,” Wolfe said. “I’m not paying you, the client is. A tiger’s eyes can’t make light, Saul, they can only reflect it. You’ve spent the day in the dark. Come back in the morning. I may have some suggestions.”
Saul went.
I yawned. Or rather, I started to, and stopped. It is true that wine always makes me yawn, but it is also true that the aftereffect of a series of socks on my jaw and the side of my neck makes me stop yawning. I swiveled my chair around with a swing of my body, not bothering to put my hand on the edge of my desk for an assist. A simultaneous protest came from at least forty muscles, and, since Harry was no longer there, I groaned without restraint.
“I guess I’ll go to bed,” I stated.
“Not yet,” Wolfe objected. “It’s only half-past ten. You have to go to your job in the morning and I haven’t heard your report.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Go ahead.”
And three hours later, at half-past one in the morning, we were still there and I was still reporting. I have never known him to be
more thorough, wanting every detail and every little word. My face felt stiff as a board, and I hurt further down, especially my left side, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction and pleasure of hearing me groan again, and I didn’t. After I had given him everything he kept coming back for more, and when it was no longer possible to continue that without making it perfectly plain that he was merely trying to see how long it would take me to collapse on the floor there in front of him, he asked:
“What do you think?”
I tried to grin at him, but I doubt if I put it over.
“I think,” I said, “that the crucial point in this case will come in about a month or six weeks, when we’ll have to decide whether to stop and send in our bill or go on a while longer. It will depend on two things—how much we need the money, and how much Naylor-Kerr will pay for nothing. That’s the problem that confronts us and we must somehow solve it.”
“Then you don’t think Mr. Moore was murdered.”
“I don’t know. There are at least two hundred people who might have murdered him. If one of them did, and if there were any possible way of finding out which one, naturally I have my favorites. I have mentioned Pine. I like the idea of him because it is always gratifying to call a bullheaded bluff, and if it was him he certainly tried one when he hired you. But if he’s the sort of bird who takes it in his stride when his wife keeps two-legged pets on account of her owning stock in the company that pays his salary, what would ever work him up to murder? Anyhow, she had given Moore the boot. My real favorite is Kerr Naylor.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes, sir. On account of psychology. Wait till you see him Monday. His last ten incarnations he was a cat, and he always held the world’s record for mouse-playing. Add that to the well-known impulse of a murderer to confess, and what have you got? Although it has all been filed away as a hit-and-run with the hit-runner not found and not likely to be at this late day, he has got that impulse, so he tells the world, including a Deputy Commissioner of Police, that it was murder. That satisfies the impulse without costing him anything, and also it carries on the tradition of his cat ancestry. Baby, what fun! In this case the mouse is the people in his department, the president of the firm and the Board of Directors, the cops—everybody but him. Yep, he’s my favorite.”
“Any others?”
I started to wave a hand but called it back on a word from my shoulder. “Plenty. Dickerson, for the honor of the Section. Rosenbaum, hipped on Miss Livsey and wanting to save her from a two-bit Casanova. And so on. But this is all academic. We might reach some kind of a conclusion, but what if we do? The waves have washed all the footprints away, and as I said before, all we’ll be able to solve is the question when to quit and render a bill. The only consolation is that I’ll get a wife out of it. I’m going to make Miss Livsey forget Waldo.”
“Confound it.” Wolfe reached for his beer glass and saw that it was empty, lifted the bottle and found it empty too, and glared at both of them. “I suppose we’d better go to bed. Are you in pain?”
“Pain? Why? I thought we might sit and talk a while. This is a very difficult case.”
“It may be. Tomorrow I’d like to see Mrs. Pine. She can come at eleven in the morning, or right after lunch. You can arrange it through Mr. Pine.” He gripped the edge of his desk with both hands, the customary preliminary to getting to his feet.
The phone rang. I swiveled my chair, not groaning, and lifted the instrument.
“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”
“Oh, Mr. Goodwin? My husband has told me about you. This is Cecily Pine, Mrs. Jasper Pine.”
“Yes, Mrs. Pine.”
“I just got home from a theater supper, and my husband told me about your inquiry regarding Waldo Moore. I would like to help, if I can in any way, and I don’t think these things should be put off, so I’ll drive down there now. I have the address.”
I tried to keep my voice friendly and sociable. “I’m afraid it would be better to make it tomorrow, Mrs. Pine. It’s pretty late, and Mr. Wolfe—”
But he ruined it. He had got on his extension, and broke in, “This is Mr. Wolfe, Mrs. Pine. I think it would be better to come now. An excellent idea. You have the address?”
She said she had and would leave right away, and only had to come from Sixty-seventh Street. Wolfe and I hung up.
“It’s unfortunate,” Wolfe said. “You should be in bed, but it may be necessary for you to take notes.”
“I’m not sleepy,” I said through my teeth. “I was hoping she would call.”
14.
Considering what I knew of her, I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened the door and let her in. Probably I had unconsciously been expecting something on the order of Hedy Lamarr as she would be with the wrinkles of age, and therefore the sight of her pink smooth-skinned wholesome face and her medium-sized housewife’s chassis, a little plump maybe, but certainly not fat, gave me a shock.
“You’re Archie Goodwin,” she said in a low-pitched educated voice.
I admitted it.
She was openly staring at me, and advanced a step to see better. “What on earth,” she asked, “has happened to your face? It’s all red and bruised!”
“Yeah. I got in a fight with a man and he hit me with his fist. Both fists.”
“Good heavens! It looks simply awful. Have you got any beefsteak?”
I did not believe, considering everything, that she was speaking from experience. She had simply read about it. I told her that it wasn’t bad enough to rate beefsteak at ninety cents a pound, adding pointedly that all I needed was a good long night’s sleep, and ushered her into the office.
Wolfe was on his feet, having probably got up to stretch. Mrs. Pine crossed to him to shake hands, declined the red leather chair because she preferred straight ones, accepted the one I placed for her, let me take her coat of platinum mink or aluminum sable or whatever it was, and sat down.
“You really ought to do something for your face,” she told me.
The funny thing was that her harping on it didn’t irritate me. She gave me the distinct impression that it really made her feel uncomfortable for me to be uncomfortable, and how could I resent that? So we discussed my face until Wolfe finally dived into an opening.
“You wanted to see me, madam, did you?”
She turned to him, and her manner changed completely, possibly because he didn’t have bruises and red spots.
“Yes, I did,” she said crisply. “I thoroughly disapprove of what my husband has done, engaging you to investigate the death of Waldo Moore. What good can it possibly do?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” Wolfe was leaning back, with his forearms paralleled on the arms of his chair. “That’s a question for your husband. If you don’t like his engaging me you should persuade him to disengage me.”
“I can’t. I’ve been trying to. He’s being extremely stubborn about it, and that’s why I came to see you.”
Good for Jasper, I thought, but who the hell stuck a ramrod down his spine?
Mrs. Pine went on. “I suppose, of course, my husband has committed himself—or rather, the firm. If you withdraw from it, now, there’ll be no difficulty about that. I’ll pay whatever it comes to.”
“What good would that do you?” Wolfe inquired testily. I won’t go so far as to say that he never liked women, but he sure didn’t like women who picked up the ball and started off with it. “Your husband would hire someone else. Besides, madam, while I like to charge high prices for doing something, I haven’t formed the habit of charging for doing nothing, and I won’t start with you. No. Obviously you’re accustomed to getting what you want, but there must be some other way of doing it. What is it you want?”
Mrs. Pine turned to me. For a second I thought she was going to revert to my face, but instead she asked, “What’s he like, Archie? Is he as stubborn as he sounds?”
The Archie came from her perfectly natural. “From him,” I told he
r, “I would call that almost flabby.”
“Good heavens.” She regarded Wolfe with interest but with no sign of dismay. “I presume,” she said abruptly, “you know that Waldo Moore was at one time a close friend of mine?”
Wolfe nodded. “I have been told so. By Mr. Goodwin. He got his information from a newspaperman. Apparently it is known.”
“Yes, of course. That’s the advantage of not trying to hide things; things that people know about are taken for granted. But permitting people to know about them, and permitting them to be publicly discussed in newspapers—that’s a very different thing. Do you suppose for a moment, Mr. Wolfe, that I’m going to sit and do nothing while you make pictures for tabloids out of my private life? While you make a public sensation out of the death of Waldo Moore?”
“Certainly not, madam.” Wolfe was still testy. “It’s quite plain that you aren’t going to sit and do nothing. You aren’t now. You’ve come here to see me at half-past two in the morning. By the way, you must have asked that same question of your husband. What did he say?”
“He says it will not become a public sensation. He says that all he is after is to stop the gossip at the office and make it impossible for my brother to start it again. But I don’t care to run that risk and I don’t intend to.”
“What does your brother say? Have you discussed it with him?”
That pricked her skin. Since I had not yet been told to take notes I was able to give her face my full attention, and that was the first sign it showed of needing to go into conference. She pressed her lips together and said nothing. It occurred to me that it seemed to run in the family, since at my so-called lunch with Kerr Naylor the first and only time he had paused to think had been when his sister had been inserted into the conversation.
She finally spoke: “I don’t know what is in my brother’s mind—not exactly. He won’t tell me, though he usually does. He is a—very peculiar man. He dislikes my husband and all of the other top men in the company—all except one or two.”
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