Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 12

by Too Many Women

  Wolfe grunted. “Does he dislike you?”

  “Why, no. No!”

  “Then why doesn’t he stop his flummery about murder when you ask him to?”

  “He doesn’t—” She stopped, then went on, “That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but my brother says exactly what my husband says, that there’s no danger of it’s becoming public. But I don’t care what they say, there’s still a risk, and I have always believed in doing anything within reason to avoid unnecessary risks. If my husband and my brother are both going to act like spoiled brats—actually making idiots of themselves in my opinion—then I’ll have to take things into my own hands.”

  She looked at me, and immediately became a different woman. “It seems a little chilly in here, Archie. May I have my coat?”

  I thought no wonder, since she was still dressed for the theater, with nothing above the bra line but skin. For her age, which must surely have been mine plus ten, the skin was absolutely acceptable. I got the coat and draped it over her shoulders, and she smiled up at me for thanks, and I went and upped the thermostat a notch.

  She resumed on Wolfe. “The best way, I thought, would be to deal directly with you. Perhaps you’re quite right—if you simply quit, as I asked, my husband would engage someone else. Then why not let him have what he wants? Apparently he wants you to investigate, and my brother does too, so why not? You will be paid whatever has been agreed on, and in addition I will give you my personal check, and you can’t possibly object that I am paying you for nothing, because you will give me your guarantee that the investigation will not—let’s see—that no publicity will result. It doesn’t matter how we put it so long as we understand what we mean. The check could be for—ten thousand dollars?”

  Wolfe was shaking his head at her. “For heaven’s sake,” he muttered incredulously. “Do you realize you’re offering to pay me to keep a secret?”

  Her eyes widened. “I am not! What secret?”

  “I don’t know. Yet. But your husband—or his firm, in which you are the largest stockholder—is paying me to discover something, and you want to pay me to conceal it if and when I discover it. You called your husband and brother idiots, but what do you call yourself? You offer ten thousand dollars. You assume that I am capable of double-dealing. If I am, why should I stop there? Why not a hundred thousand, a million? Madam, you’re an imbecile.”

  She ignored the complaint and was concentrating on the logic. “That’s silly,” she said scornfully. “Would I have come to you like this if I hadn’t known your reputation? That would be blackmailing, and you’re not a crook!”

  Wolfe was speechless, which was one more piece of evidence that he didn’t understand women half as well as he did men. I got her with no trouble at all. Her position was simply that if he double-crossed Naylor-Kerr, Inc., there would be nothing crooked about it because that was what she wanted, whereas if he double-crossed or blackmailed her he would be a snide, a louse, and a blackguard; and she knew his reputation, and he wasn’t.

  Seeing there was no meeting of minds and one wasn’t likely, I put in, “Look, Mrs. Pine, it won’t work that way, really it won’t. You can’t bribe him or threaten him.”

  She gazed at me, and evidently I wasn’t Archie any more, at least not at the moment.

  “I haven’t tried to threaten him,” she stated.

  “I know you haven’t. I just put that in.”

  She looked at Wolfe, and then back at me. “But—” She was inspecting an idea. “It should be possible to have his license revoked. With the taxes I pay and the people I know, I should be able to do that. Doesn’t a detective have to have a license?”

  That nearly made me speechless too, but somebody had to keep up our end. “He sure does,” I told her, “and I’m one too. You might try that, Alice, but I doubt if you’ll get anywhere.”

  “My name is Cecily.”

  “I know it is. I meant Alice in Wonderland. You remind me of her.”

  “That’s a wonderful book,” she declared. “I read it over again just recently, Are you men partners?”

  “No, I work for him.”

  “I don’t see why. I don’t see how you can stand him. How much would it take for you to go into business for yourself?”

  “Pfui,” Wolfe interposed. “This is tommyrot. You would find, madam, if you made the slightest effort, that I am a reasonable man. Do you want a suggestion from me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said reasonably. “Tell me what it is first.”

  “It’s this. You’ll never accomplish anything with this sort of cackle—not with Mr. Goodwin or me. Anyway, even if I accepted your ridiculous offer, you might be wasting your money. Your assumptions may not be sound. Evidently you assume that if we do a competent job of investigating Mr. Moore’s death it is certain, or at least highly probable, that a public scandal will result. What makes you so sure of that?”

  She looked at him appreciatively. “That’s quite clever,” she said generously. “If I really were sure and told you why, it would be a great help to you. But I’m not sure at all. I just don’t want to run the risk.”

  “Do you share your brother’s opinion that Mr. Moore was murdered?”

  “Certainly not. It was an accident.”

  “Had you seen Mr. Moore that day? The day he was killed?”

  “No. I hadn’t seen him for months.” She laughed. It came from her throat on out, as if something had really struck her as funny. “He was going to get married! To a girl at the office named Livsey, Hester Livsey. He phoned me one day to tell me about it. Of course you can’t realize how grotesque that was because you didn’t know him.”

  “Did you advise him not to marry?”

  “Heavens, no. It wouldn’t have done any good. If I had known the girl I might have given her some advice, but not Waldo.” Mrs. Pine turned to me. “Is this a habit of his, Archie? He said he had a suggestion for me, and instead he cross-examines me.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “He doesn’t do it deliberately. His mind jumps the track.”

  “The suggestion,” Wolfe told her, ignoring me, “is a contingent one. It’s no good unless you’ve been telling the truth. If you have no knowledge of facts the disclosure of which would cause a sensation, and all you’re after is insurance against a risk, why not trust to my discretion? I have some, and I would gain neither pleasure nor profit from starting a public uproar unnecessarily. Why not help me get it over with? Its kernel is your brother’s tenacity, his fondness for the notion of murder—or at least for the word. I suppose you know your brother better than anyone else does. Why not help with him? Why not start now by telling us about him? For instance, I understand that you asked him to give Mr. Moore a job. Did he have any objection to that?”

  It was a fair try, but it didn’t work. Apparently Wolfe hadn’t noticed that she was allergic to talk of her brother, but that doesn’t seem likely, since he notices everything. At any rate, it was no go. She didn’t abruptly end the interview—on the contrary, she seemed quite willing to sit and chat all night—but she was utterly disinclined to furnish us with a biography of her brother. The most specific statement Wolfe could drag out of her was that her brother was peculiar, and she had already told us that, and we knew it anyway.

  Finally Wolfe got hold of the edge of his desk, pushed his chair back, and stood up. Mrs. Pine arose too, and I went and helped her on with her coat.

  In the hall, with my hand on the knob of the front door, she stood where I couldn’t open it without banging her toe, and told me sympathetically, “I hope your face is better tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. So do I.”

  “And you didn’t answer my question about how much it would take for you to start your own business.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. I’ll figure it up.”

  “Do you like symphony concerts?”

  “Yes, some, when I’m lying down. I mean on the radio.”

  She laughed. “Anyway, it’s nearly
April. Boating? Golf? Baseball?”

  “Baseball. I go as often as I can get away.”

  “It’s a wonderful game, isn’t it? Yankees or Giants?”

  “Both. Either one, whichever’s in town.”

  “I’ll send you season tickets. Frankly, Archie, I think my brother is crazy. Don’t tell Mr. Wolfe I said that.”

  “I never tell him anything.”

  “Then that’s our first secret. Good night.”

  I escorted her out, down the stoop and to the curb, but didn’t get to open the car door for her because her chauffeur was already attending to that. As I reascended the steps I was telling myself that I mustn’t forget to phone Lon Cohen in the morning and inform him that the job was practically mine but nothing doing on his ten per cent because I was landing it strictly on merit.

  Back in the house I made a beeline for the stairs, taking no chances, but found it desirable to mount one step at a time. My room was two flights up. On the first landing I turned and yelled back down, “I’m going up and figure how much it will set her back to furnish my office! Good night!”

  15.

  The next morning, Thursday, the arena of the stock department was a different place as far as I was concerned. Whenever I showed my face, coming and going, the change could be seen, felt, and tasted. Wednesday morning I had been a combination of a new male, to be given the once over and labeled, and an intruder from outside who could be expected to regard the lovely little darlings merely as units of personnel. Thursday morning I was a detective after a murderer. That’s what they all thought, and they all showed it. Whether Kerr Naylor had started another ball rolling, or whether it was just seepage from various leaks, I didn’t know, but the reaction that greeted me wherever I went left no doubt of the fact.

  The bits of tobacco in the folder had not been disturbed. That was no great disappointment, since I had no good reason to suppose that anyone in the place was sitting on tacks, and I left the set-up intact. At ten o’clock I got Jasper Pine on the phone and gave him a report of the Mr. and Mrs. Harold Anthony episode.

  I also said, “Your wife came to see us last night.”

  “I know she did,” he replied, and let it go at that. It was a fair guess that his position was that there was no point in asking what she had said because she had already said everything to him about everything. When I told him that the whole department apparently had me tagged as a bloodhound, he said grimly that in that case I might as well act like one and gave me the run of the pasture.

  My first gallop was out of the pasture entirely, up to the Gazette office to see Lon Cohen, having first called him. I had a healthy curiosity not only about Pine’s attitude toward his wife’s fondness for pets, but also about her and Moore. Wanting the lowdown, I came away, after a session with Lon and talks with a couple of legmen, satisfied that I had it. Either Pine had years ago adopted the philosophy that a wife’s personal habits are none of a husband’s business, and really didn’t give a damn, and Mrs. Pine had completely lost interest in Moore early in 1946, except to see that he got a job, or the Gazette boys were living in a dream world, which didn’t seem likely.

  I bought them a lunch at Pietro’s and then returned to William Street. There was nothing in my office for me, no message from Wolfe or Pine or even Kerr Naylor, and the drawer of the cabinet hadn’t been touched. I was still without a bridle and could pick my own directions. Across the arena to Miss Livsey’s room was, I thought, as good as any.

  Her door was open and she was inside, typing. I entered, shut the door, lowered myself onto the chair at the end of her desk, and inquired, “What thoughts have you got about Rosa Bendini?”

  “What on earth,” she inquired back, “have you been doing with your face?” She was gazing at it.

  “You may think,” I said, “that you’re changing the subject, but actually you’re not. There’s a connection. It was Rosa’s husband who embroidered my face. What’s your opinion of her in ten thousand words?”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Come on, come on. Being sweet and womanly when you haven’t even started to forget that Moore? Quit stalling.”

  She showed a hint of color, very faint, but the first I had seen of it. “I’m not stalling,” she denied. “If you can’t feel it you ought to look in a mirror and see it. What about Rosa Bendini?”

  I grinned at her to show her that the muscles worked, no matter how it looked. “So you’re asking me instead. Okay. She calls Moore Wally. She says that he never had any intention of marrying you, and that you went crazy—these are her words—when you found out that he was still seeing her, and that you have never recovered. I may add that I don’t believe everything I hear, because if you have never recovered you must be crazy now, and on that I vote no.”

  The color had gone. She had held her working pose in front of her typewriter, her fingertips resting on the frame of the machine, implying that I had just dropped in to say hello and would soon drop out again, but now her torso and head came square to me to meet my eyes straight. The tone of her voice matched the expression of her eyes.

  “You should have asked me to give you a list of the best ones to go to for gossip, but maybe you didn’t need to, because, if you had, Rosa would have been near the top, and you’ve already found her yourself. When you’ve found the others, please don’t bother repeating it to me. I have a lot of work to do.” Her body pivoted back to its working position, she looked at the paper in the machine and then at her notebook, and her fingers hit the keys.

  I had my choice of several remarks, among them being that Rosa had found me, not me her, but it would have had to be a loud yawp to carry over the din of the typewriter, so I saved my breath and departed.

  The day was more than half gone and I hadn’t made a beginning on the names I had got from Rosa. I returned to my room, got the head of the reserve pool on the phone, said I would like to have a talk with Miss Gwynne Ferris of his section, and asked if he would send her to see me. He said he was sorry, Miss Ferris was busy at the moment taking dictation from a section head whose secretary was absent for the day, and would a little later do? I told him sure, any time at his and her convenience, and as I pushed the phone back I became aware that my doorway was being darkened.

  The darkener was a tall bony young man with a lot of undisciplined hair that could have used a comb or even a barber’s scissors. He looked like a poet getting very deep into something, and since his eyes were unmistakably fastened on me, evidently I was what was being probed.

  “May I come in, Mr. Truett?” he inquired in a rumble like low thunder from the horizon.

  When I told him yes he entered, closed the door, crossed to a chair in three huge strides, sat, and informed me, “I’m Ben Frenkel. Benjamin Frenkel. I understand you’re here looking for the murderer of Waldo Moore.”

  So if I didn’t have Gwynne Ferris I had the next best thing, the intense young man who, according to Rosa, had been beckoned and promised by her until he didn’t know which way was south.

  Meeting his gaze, I had to concentrate to keep from being stared right out through the window behind me. “I wouldn’t put it like that, Mr. Frenkel,” I told him, “but I don’t mind if you do.”

  He smiled sweetly and sadly. “That will do for my purpose,” he stated. “I wouldn’t expect you to commit yourself. I’ve been here before, several times, since I heard this morning what you are here for, but I didn’t find you in. I wanted to tell you that I am under the strong impression that I killed Moore. I have had that impression ever since the night it happened—or I should say the next day.”

  He stopped. I nodded at him encouragingly. “It’s still your turn, Mr. Frenkel. That’s too vague. Is it just an impression, or can you back it up?”

  “Not very satisfactorily, I’m afraid.” He was frowning, a cloud on his wide brow for his thunder nimble. “I was hoping you would straighten it out and I would be rid of it. Can I tell you about it confidentially?”

  “Tha
t depends. I couldn’t sign up to keep a confession of murder confidential—”

  “My God, I’m not confessing!”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  He took a deep breath, held it a couple of seconds, and let it out. “My hatred for Waldo Moore,” he said, “was one of the strongest feelings I have ever had in my life. Possibly the strongest. I won’t tell you why, because I have no right to drag in another person’s name. I doubt if any man ever hated another one as I hated him. It went on for months, and I was frightened at it, literally frightened. I have always had a profound interest in the phenomenon of death. The two merged inside of me. There was a fusion, a synthesis, of those two reactions to stimuli. The one, the hatred, was emotional, and the other, the interest in death, was intellectual; and the two came together. As a result I became preoccupied with the conception of the death of Moore, and I thought of it, over and over again, in concrete and specific terms. The conception of a car running over him and crushing the life out of him came to me many times, I don’t know how many, but dozens.”

  “It wasn’t a conception that hit him, it was a sedan.”

  “Certainly. I’m not suggesting anything esoteric. I live in a furnished room on Ninety-fourth Street not far from Broadway. One evening I was sitting there in my room, and those conceptions, those I have spoken of, were filling my mind. It was an extremely exhausting experience; it always was. Psychologically it might be compared to a trance resulting from a congestion of the cerebral cells brought about by prolonged and unendurable tension. My head ached and I lay on the bed.”

  I was getting bored. “And went to sleep and dreamed.”

  “No, I didn’t. I went to sleep, but I didn’t dream. That is, the overwhelming impression was that I had been asleep. That was a little after one in the morning, ten minutes after one. At the moment of consciousness I was opening the door of the bathroom. I thought to myself that I must have been very deep in sleep to have left the bed and got to the bathroom door at the other side of the room without being aware of it. My mind was completely empty, and rested; there were no dreams in it at all, though there often are when I get up. That was all there was to it that night; I undressed and went to bed and after a while went back to sleep; but in the morning, when I read the news of Moore’s death in the paper—of course it was an electrifying experience for me—my mind was suddenly occupied, completely dominated, by the impression that I had killed him. I think one little circumstance was a major factor in the birth of the impression: the circumstance that the car that killed him had been found parked on Ninety-fifth Street, just one block from where I lived.”